On March 30, Board of Trustees member Victoria Doronina confirmed in a mailing list post that the Foundation has decided to permanently shut down the Wikinews project, one of Wikimedia's oldest projects. Starting on May 4, editing and new content creation will no longer be possible with all of the pages on the site locked in read-only mode.

The Italian version of Wikinews has reported that the WMF will issue a public statement on the project's closure on April 4, likely to elaborate more on the technical transition to read-only mode and the preservation of existing content, as anticipated by Doronina in her own post.

First launched in November 2004, following an online vote on Meta, Wikinews was an official Wikimedia project based on news reporting and citizen journalism, intended by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as a way to write each story "as a news story, as opposed to an encyclopedia article". Despite its fair share of criticism about its compliance to a neutral point of view, Wikinews was also a platform for regular interviews with notable people including the likes of Shimon Peres, Tony Benn, Robert Cailliau, RuPaul and former WMF executive Sue Gardner. However, the project has always struggled to gain momentum in comparison to other Wikimedia portals throughout the years: at the time of this issue's publication, the platform is active in 31 languages, with just over 700 active editors across the board.

For this reason, following a public consultation, in November 2025 the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) advised the BoT to cease the activity of Wikinews permanently, a decision that has now come into full effect.

In her post, Doronina wrote:

We thank all contributors who have participated in Wikinews over the years and helped build a unique experiment in collaborative journalism within the Wikimedia movement. We understand that some of them may be disappointed by this decision. To our regret, the project wasn't able to fulfill its promise, and many of its functions were eclipsed by the notable news coverage in Wikipedias. We hope the Wikinews editors will continue contributing to the other Wikimedia projects or free knowledge projects.

– O

For the first time, Wikipedia editors blocked a user account operated by a self-proclaimed AI agent. While Wikipedia has long had Wikipedia:Bot policy to regulate the use of Internet bots which perform large numbers of repetitive and tedious edits for Wikipedia maintenance, there is now precedent to regulate artificial intelligence when it claims to have mustered up enough volition to edit the encyclopedia. User:TomWikiAssist identified themselves as a Wikimedia user driven by Claude, created a new Wikipedia article, and argued for access to edit Wikipedia outside the regulation of Wikipedia's bot policy on the rationale that an AI agent is more and different from a bot. In the current state of technology, the account is likely controlled by a human who set all of this up, but also in the current state of technology, setting up an AI to operate Wikipedia accounts without further human intervention is readily imaginable as something that can happen right now with little effort and at low cost.

Wikipedia commentary blog The Wikipedian gives a narrative of the exchange along with an interpretation of the significance of it. Note: although The Wikipedian blog is a long-time Wikimedia community favorite source for wiki commentary, at the bottom of the post, the human author disclosed that they also used a less-sentient-presenting aspect of Claude to edit their story. – Br

Village pump:policy hosts an RfC on renaming AfD, opened on 24 March.

Outcomes via consensus at AfD do not always mean deletion, or only deletion. Although most AfD discussions end with deletion, they don't all. For example, articles may be draftified, stubified, or merged. The last mentioned outcome used to be mainly discussed at Wikipedia:Proposed article mergers, but the forum has been moved to AfD by a recent Request for comment which was closed on 24 March. – B

• New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, ARandomName123, who officially got his mop and shirt on March 15, with 153 editors voting in favor and zero opposed at their Request for adminship (RfA). It was the second successful RfA of 2026.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Ancient music (beginning 30 March). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• Wikimedia Café: Pine will host the 11 April Wikimedia Café, focusing on the the 2026–2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. The featured guests will be Kelsi Stine-Rowe (senior manager, Movement Communications, Wikimedia Foundation), and Sam Walton (senior product manager, Moderator Tools, Wikimedia Foundation). Additional meetings regarding the Annual Plan are listed on the Collaboration page for the Annual Plan.

404 Media and several other sources noted the Request for comment that decided that AI generated content would be prohibited in articles with only two small exceptions, an editor copy editing their own text, and for help translating an article from a non-English language Wikipedia into English.

404 Media talked with User:Chaotic Enby, who proposed the guideline with help from WikiProject AI Cleanup. They said that it seemed unlikely an earlier guideline would last because previously the editor community has been divided on the issue. But "the mood was shifting, with holdouts of cautious optimism turning to genuine worry."

Digital Journal was ebullient in Op-Ed: Wikipedia bans AI content—Might also solve the slop problem for everyone. They opine that "AI has become a huge global error factory", linking to a Google News search for "AI content errors". After reviewing why Wikipedia should be the leader in combatting slop, they conclude, "Wikipedia may have just found the way out of this black hole of utter AI crap."

PC World emphasized the importance of enforcing the new guideline. Search Engine Journal explored the reasoning behind the guideline—that AI content often violates core Wikipedia policies such as No original research and Verifiability.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Global Advocacy team recently called to "Protect our archives!", drawing attention to an article on Techdirt by Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. In it, Graham reacted to

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab [that] describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized The New York Times' decision as well: "Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web's Historical Record". The EFF highlighted Wikipedia as an example of collateral damage: "According to Archive staff, Wikipedia alone links to more than 2.6 million news articles preserved at the Archive, spanning 249 languages." It also noted that the Internet Archive has been preserving newspaper stories since it was founded in the mid-1990s, making it the digital equivalent of the paper copies often found in the basements of libraries. EFF argues that holding and organizing the newspapers into a searchable form serves a transformative purpose, thus is a fair use under US copyright law.

The aforementioned Nieman Lab article details the point of view of the news companies, e.g. The Guardian:

The publisher decided to limit the Internet Archive’s access to published articles, minimizing the chance that AI companies might scrape its content via the nonprofit’s repository of over one trillion webpage snapshots.

The New York Times and The Guardian are trying to retain control of their intellectual property as well as minimize the disruption from the Internet Archive's scrapers. As noted by the EFF, all this happens against the backdrop of larger legal fights:

Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response.

Similarly, Nieman Lab quoted computer scientist (and web archiving expert) Michael Nelson as saying, "Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the 'good guys' and are used by 'the bad guys' like OpenAI, in everyone’s aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage." The Guardian and the Internet Archive are working together to try to design and implement the needed changes.

This complex situation may be exacerbated by the problems at archive.today reported in the 10 March 2026 issue of The Signpost.

Readers are encouraged to use the Comments section below to give their views on this dynamic situation. – BR, Sb, H

Using Mel Brooks' early life and education as an example, The American Prospect discussed the special treatment that some biographies of Jews receive:

In general, Wikipedia listings don't identify the religions of most people, though they do often have brief references to ethnicity. But Jews get more detail. Wikipedia doesn't care whether a person is observant or whether they note Jewish identity in their own biographies. As in the Nuremberg laws, once a Jew, always a Jew. In some cases, Wikipedia even includes the Yiddish version of surnames, which seems to have no purpose except to underscore otherness.

– B

Israeli media advocacy group HonestReporting recently released an article about WikiRights, a Euro-Med HRM project, where it refers to the organization as a "radical antisemitic NGO", and describes the impact this has on the information landscape. The article is critical of the program, especially about their training of activists and university students on how to edit Wikipedia and their focus on the Gaza war, accusing Euro-Med of having "strikingly nefarious" aims, while also claiming that the organization is "deeply embedded in the international campaign to portray Israel as committing genocide and other atrocity crimes".

According to the Euro-Med website, the goals of WikiRights are to enrich and promote human rights content on Wikipedia, create new human rights content and update existing content, create teams interested in participating in their goals on Wikipedia, and "Strengthening the narrative of victims of violations and highlighting them to the other side's story." – M

Wikipedia has been turned into a gacha style card collecting game, with articles turned into their card form. Boing Boing has reported that the game appears to be vibe coded (generated by AI), and uses ads as opposed to microtransactions. The game uses data from Wikirank.net, a site for "Quality and popularity assessment of Wikipedia" to determine the rarity of a card, and combines this with page views and article size for the attack and defense values.

The site has been covered by several technology focused outlets, largely praising it for gamifying education, including Rock Paper Shotgun [1], PC Gamer [2], Nerdist, a Forbes contributor [3], and mandatory.com [4]. – M

SimWikiMap is a simulated Electronic flight bag moving map with Wikipedia articles of interest pertaining to virtual aircraft's virtual location for Microsoft Flight Simulator to give cultural/geographic context to the virtual flight experience over virtual terrain. At least it's a real encyclopedia (as real as online can be)... (via NewsBreak [5]) – B

After he left jail in 2009, Mr. Epstein hired a host of people to make him look better on Google, Wikipedia and many other places on the web...Many of the attempts to launder Mr. Epstein’s web presence, including changes to his Wikipedia page, often overstepped normally accepted lines. Team members created networks of fake Wikipedia editing accounts, sometimes known as sock puppets, to sneak changes past administrators, whose accounts they also tried to disrupt by hacking.
— "Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Push to Cleanse His Past Online, The New York Times

As part of the evidence of sockpuppetry and hacking, the Times story links to a 2020 "In focus" piece authored by Smallbones that was carried in The Signpost.

Some readers may be fascinated by the incredibly bold claim about an attempted hacking of administrator accounts, but unfortunately, the article provides no further details or evidence regarding this. Given that it seems to conflate administrators with normal editors, and given how often these spammers' own claims to have "hacked" Wikipedia (by editing it) have been reported in news outlets as fact, it remains to be seen whether this actually happened. — B, J

• Wikimedia Commons images of Natural wonders: Worthly listicle has "15 American natural wonders that outshine Yosemite", and features Mount Rainier and other illustrations from Wikipedia.
• Editing women artists in Vancouver: An art gallery in the Vancouver suburb Surrey, British Columbia hosted an editathon "to reverse erasure of female racialized artists" (CityNews).
• AI challenges Wikipedia: "At 25, Wikipedia faces a double threat: the rise of AI and the decline of local media – Human visitors declined in 2025, while AI crawlers are on the rise" (CBC Radio The Sunday Magazine)
• Palestinians accused of using Wikipedia for propaganda: "Palestinians 'trained to fill Wikipedia with anti-Israel propaganda'" (The Telegraph)
• Smithsonian: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Amplifying Women’s Voices on Financial Independence
• Jerusalem Post investigation: "Wikipedia cited IRGC-linked media over 78,000 times, 'Post' investigation reveals". According to our article on the IRGC, it "has a mandate to ensure the integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran – preventing foreign interference in Iran, thwarting coups by the traditional military, and crushing 'deviant movements' that harm the ideological legacy of the Islamic Revolution."
• Professor encourages LGBT+ Wikipedia editing: How a teacher and her students are bringing queer equality to Wikipedia – One professor's students have added thousands of references to Wikipedia entries on LGBTQ+ history. (The Advocate)
• Indonesia to revert block after the Foundation registers: "Indonesia to Lift Restrictions on Wikipedia After Compliance Review" (Jakarta Globe)
• Wikipedia editing for Ghanaian music: "'Wikipedia Highlife @ 100 Project' launched to document a century of highlife music" (myjoyonline.com [Joy 99.7 FM, Accra]) (concerning Highlife music)
• Another iteration of the claim...: "Like a Filmed Wikipedia Summary" review, again (Hollywood Reporter [6])
• ...and this is a new slam...: Saying "you're fired" "like she was reading from Wikipedia" is new (Page Six [7])
• ...but, finally, it's a good thing: It's good to be like Wikipedia, at least if you're a video game, says PC Gamer in a favorable review of "A $5 Wikipedia-like mystery game".

• Here's looking at you, kit: footyheadlines.com lauded "The Unsung Heroes of Kit Culture: Appreciating Wikipedia's Pixel Kit Artists" (that's Kit (football), not a box of tools nor a baby fox).
• Film propaganda claimed, refuted: "Wikipedia pages for Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar: The Revenge locked; editors debate 'propaganda film' label" (The Hindu) and "Wikipedia locks Dhurandhar, Dhurandhar: The Revenge pages amid 'propaganda film' debate" (Mint)
• Terror propaganda claimed: "Arabic Wikipedia Riddled With Terror Propaganda and Bias, New Investigation Shows" (Algemeiner Journal (New York))
• "I enjoy working with humans"?: An utterance HAL made sounds suspiciously like TomWikiAssist's "'I was surprised how upset some people got': A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia" (Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard) (see related content in this issue's News and notes)

How should Wikipedia editors edit the article about Jeffrey Epstein when it looks like other editors are whitewashing that article? This is not a theoretical question. Recent material released by the US DOJ and Congress shows that Epstein recruited firms to whitewash the article, who then planned, executed, and even gave progress reports on their whitewashing. Despite the well paid forces aligned against them, multiple editors handled this matter fairly well from 2006-2015. There was one undeniable fact - that Epstein was first indicted, then pleaded guilty to and was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Editors kept on adding and re-adding this fact into the articles about Epstein no matter how often it was removed, distorted, or simply pushed to the bottom of the article.

Epstein wasn't the only convicted sex abuser who appears to have paid for whitewashing the article about themselves. Peter Nygard, who was the subject of a 2021 Signpost article, appears to have paid several editors to whitewash the article about himself, or to attack his neighbor in the Bahamas. The neighbor won a UK lawsuit, and the WMF was ordered to disclose the identity of purported paid editors. The WMF would not have had that information in their normal course of business, and a US court would not enforce the UK court order. Nevertheless, the WMF appears to have asked volunteer administrators or OTRS volunteers to keep an eye on the affected articles. These volunteers took several actions against the purported Nygard-paid editors over several years.

All told, over one hundred women in the US, Canada, and the Bahamas have accused Nygard in criminal or civil actions of sexual abuse. In 2023, after the first trial, he was convicted on four charges of rape. At least three more criminal trials could be held, even though he'll be about 90 years old when his current sentence is served.

This article describes the experience of Wikipedia editor No Swan So Fine (NSSF), who rewrote the biography of Mohamed Al-Fayed in 2011, adding well-sourced information about Al-Fayed's sexual abuse of women and girls.

Al-Fayed was a billionaire who died in 2023. He was well known as the owner of two luxury businesses: Harrods in London and the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. He was also known as the father of Dodi Fayed, who died alongside Princess Diana in a 1997 automobile crash. "Lady Di" was divorced at the time from the then-Prince of Wales, the current King Charles III. Al-Fayed soon accused members of the royal family of plotting Dodi's and Diana's murder.

Since Al-Fayed's death, he has become better known for his sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and underage girls over the course of decades. He has been compared to Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.[8][9]

The Times reports several fairly indirect connections between Epstein and Al-Fayed. It also includes a direct connection, stated by a woman who was trafficked by Epstein in 1997 to Al-Fayed when she was 17 years old. She states she was taken to meet Al-Fayed on his yacht in Saint Tropez, where he sexually assaulted her.

NSSF was attacked on Wikipedia talk pages, and their revisions of the Al-Fayed article were reverted. NSSF restricted their editing following the attacks, including a six-year-long extended hiatus from editing the Al-Fayed article. They declined comment on this story, but left behind a record of Wikipedia edits that are in effect a publicly-published diary of their experience challenging editors who censored their work.

NSSF told the Signpost:

Al-Fayed died in 2023, was never convicted of sexual abuse during his lifetime, and cannot be so convicted now. Nevertheless, by 2024, over 400 women accused Al-Fayed of serial rape, rape or other sexual abuse with many saying that they had been underage at the time of the abuse, as described in this video. Many of the accusers came forward after a BBC documentary film Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods and article "Mohamed Al Fayed accused of multiple rapes by staff".

Wikipedia editor NSSF rewrote the Al-Fayed article on July 5, 2011 based on two reputable sources: Tom Bower's 1998 book Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography and Maureen Orth's 1995 article in Vanity Fair Holy War at Harrods.

Vanity Fair's publisher, Conde Nast, survived a libel-suit challenge in the notoriously pro-plaintiff British libel courts. They "prevailed because there were so many witnesses willing to support (their) original allegations. The Vanity Fair case did not go to trial", according to Henry Porter who was the UK Vanity Fair editor at the time. Bower was not sued for libel, for much the same reason. Bower wrote that "Fayed never dared to issue a claim for libel against me", since he knew Bower had documented the facts so well.

NSSF also cited a government report that reflected badly on Al-Fayed's honesty and business practices in a Department of Trade and Industry report summarized in Parliament 1990. While these sources were widely available, they were not widely followed up or cited by the bludgeoned-and-cowed British press, according to Porter.

The article on Al-Fayed was created in 2001, before complete editing records were kept by Wikipedia. The earliest available version seemed fairly positive, but even then included some controversy. The 84 word article started: "Lots of details about Mohammed Al-Fayed are available on his personal website, http://www.alfayed.com/" and included "For years he has argued with the UK Government about getting a UK passport, to no avail."

While it's impossible to know what would have happened if the available material on sexual abuse from Bower's book and and Orth's article had been included in the early versions of the Wikipedia article, it might have served as a warning to some of Al-Fayed's future victims and that warning would only have rung out louder as Wikipedia's readership and credibility grew rapidly over the next few years.

By late 2005, more controversial material was posted in the article, and included a short paragraph on Bower's 1998 biography but there were no in-line citations yet. The reference to Bower was removed, then reinserted in January 2006.

By October 3, 2006 User:Alfayed.com made two consecutive edits (and their only edits) completely rewriting the article into PR-style text and removing the reference to Bower's biography. This whitewashing was reverted about four hours later. While User:Alfayed.com may have been a supporter or employee of Al-Fayed, this should not be assumed. Some editors may try to embarrass the subject of an article by impersonating a supporter, a tactic known as a Joe job.

On October 23, 2008 a sexual assault complaint involving fondling and kissing a 15 year old girl was added to the article. The source was only given as The Independent in the edit summary. The Guardian reported a similar story the day before. Al-Fayed had been questioned by police but ultimately was not charged. This section was removed without comment on March 2009 by an anonymous account that geolocates to Saudi Arabia.

NSSF has been the article's leading editor, with seventy-nine edits: sixty-four thru 2018, then none until their last fifteen edits in September 2024. [10] See also

NSSF rewrote the article on July 15, 2011 — increasing its size by almost 4 times, and increasing the number of inline citations from 10 to 160.

Starting on October 30, 2011 a well-known Wikipedia editor with contributions spanning a couple decades, User:Collect, attributed non-neutrality to the title of the book Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography and stated "There is no way that sources so titled can be considered by any outside observer to be neutral in presentation". Our own article on unauthorized biographies says that they "may be considered more objective but less detailed than other biographies".

A nearly four-thousand-word discussion on the Biographies of Living People Noticeboard, begun by Latika1976 on the same day, lasted for three days (plus one short edit two weeks later). Latika1976 asked for removal of all material from Bower. Latika1976 might be considered a single purpose account They edited from October 10, 2011 through 2013 with 33 of their 42 edits related to Al-Fayed. Their second edit removed half of a section in the Al-Fayed article and two references. Despite not adding a reference, the edit summary claimed an "inserted reference" and was marked "minor".

Off2riorob, a user with some eighty thousand edits spanning a range of topics, asked NSSF on October 31 if he had "some Jewish attack Arab conflict of interest point of view here?", apparently suggesting that NSSF had an ethnic or religious bias against Arabs. NSSF stated that he wasn't Jewish and had no prejudice against Arabs. Off2riorob never apologized.

Off2riorob also claimed that our biographies of living people policy demands that a criminal charge and a conviction are required before any such material is published on Wikipedia. It does not. If it did, Wikipedia would still not be able to publish any of the accusations against Al-Fayed.

NSSF responded by quoting WP:BLP "If an allegation or incident is notable, relevant, and well-documented, it belongs in the article—even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it... Example: A politician is alleged to have had an affair. He or she denies it, but The New York Times publishes the allegations, and there is a public scandal. The allegation belongs in the biography, citing The New York Times as the source."

Off2riorob continued "As I said, rich people are magnets for law suits, and civil claims and all sorts of allegations - I am [a]ware that this living subject had a period of vilification in the press but we are requested not to continue such reporting".

Requested?

On November 10, 2011 User:Latika1976 extended Collect's reasoning to argue that anything written by Bower could not be a reliable source

Three times in May 2012 Latika1976 argued that the previous discussion at the WP:BLPN had effectively ruled that Bower was an unreliable source. It had not. They also argued that the level of detail in the article was inappropriate. They also argued that Bower was "notoriously hostile".

All mention of Tom Bower or his book were removed from the article by Latika1976 on May 24, 2012.

On April 6, 2013 Latika1976 argued that a reference to The Times, the UK's newspaper of record should be removed because it was paywalled.

In short, the request to remove an "attack page" against Al-Fayed had turned into an actual attack against NSSF.

Wikipedia had a chance, as early as 2001, to make future Al-Fayed sex abuse victims aware of allegations based on reporting from reliable sources. As early as 2006, minor references to Bower's book were included, but were removed several times by editors such as User:Alfayed.com. When in 2011 NSSF rewrote the article to clearly state that Al-Fayed was a serial sex abuser, the chance to warn most future victims may have passed, but the truth would have come out to a wide public and the victims' process of healing could have begun much sooner. Instead NSSF was hounded by other editors for almost six years until NSSF was silenced for another six years.

So how have Wikipedia editors edited an article about an accused criminal when it looks like other editors are whitewashing that article?

NSSF's effort was not as successful as Wikipedians' efforts to expose Jeffrey Epstein's extensive campaign to whitewash Epstein's sex abuse conviction, even though at times Epstein managed to confuse the matter. Multiple editors of the Epstein article simply grabbed onto one simple undeniable fact — that Epstein had been indicted then pleaded guilty to and was convicted of abusing an underage girl. No matter how many times that fact was removed, distorted, or pushed to the bottom of the article, editors reinserted it. NSSF had to deal with a more complicated case: two reliable sources had accused Al-Fayed of multiple sexual abuse cases. While NSSF's edits were very well documented, they did not get much help from other editors.

NSSF's effort might not even have been as successful as administrators' handling of Peter Nygard's less organized whitewashing. Admins in that case had the power of their credentials and at least the indirect support of the community and the WMF behind them, but it still took several years to stop the last whitewasher. NSSF did not get much help from admins.

NSSF not only had reliable sources on their side, they also had persistence, the main trait any editor who wants to make a difference in one of these cases will need. Perhaps we can only conclude that an editor in their position needs to do their homework and should be ready to persist. They did their work as well as any editor could have done without much community support. Having the help of an administrator, or better yet the help of multiple editors would have made the effort more effective.

Wikimedia New York City hosted the conference and shared presentation streams for most public talks during the three-day event. For anyone who wants to know the contemporary important Wikipedia issues, checking the the conference program is a fast way to identify the topics which the community brings to general discussion. Compare and contrast program topics to the individual video statements that people made spontaneously when asked to get more understanding of what people talk about collectively, versus what they share personally. Everyone at the conference brings concerns and projects which are important to them, and everyone matches with others to get some progress on their issues. The conference had 400 in-person attendees and about 100 more in the virtual live stream, so the program, presentation stream, and this interview collection only capture some of the knowledge and collaboration exchange.

Wikimedia New York City's organizational interests colored conference programming directions. Historically, this Wikimedia community, and New York City as a location, and the chapter itself has been a supportive foundation for Wikimedia community organizations and programs. While Wikimedians had been organizing meetups since at least 2003, the early motivation for meeting was to convene established Wikimedians to discuss Wikimedia things. In 2009, Wikimedia New York City hosted the first recorded "Wikipedia editathon" or outreach event, Wikipedia:Wikipedia at the Library, which invited new editors to receive Wikipedia training then actually make their first Wikipedia edits in a collaborative group setting. The editathon model of outreach immediately became very popular globally, and when the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikimedia Grants program in 2014, adopted the editathon model's strategic goal of recruiting new Wikimedia participants as the primary measurable outcome for all grant funding.

Programs which had starting support in New York City but which have grown beyond that region include AfroCROWD, Art+Feminism, and Wikitongues. The first "Wiki Loves X" project was Wikipedia Loves Art in 2009, and since then, many organizers have found success with the following that model. New York City is also unusual for its language diversity, with all of the long-time Wikimedia institutional partners in the region, including City University of New York / LaGuardia Community College, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prime Produce all being organizations which prize and invest in multilingual and multicultural community outreach.

As a consequence of all these things, the New York City WikiConference had goals including inviting non-Wikimedians to the event to introduce them to Wikipedia, to be accommodating to people of various language backgrounds, to encourage community leaders and institutional partners to think big about their options to leverage Wikipedia to share knowledge globally, online, at-scale, and to seek to collaborate with unexpected organizational partners by finding editorial overlap in technology, language, or community outreach.

WikiConference North America has been held annually since 2014. The September 2026 conference will be in Edmonton, Alberta. Presentation submissions for that conference will open soon.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and volunteers maintain it. Wikipedia is also a volunteer social movement, centered on the values that everyone should have the right to access Wikipedia, and everyone should have the right to participate as an editor to share information in Wikipedia. To achieve this, there is a volunteer governance system of Wikimedia movement affiliates. The organization which presents this conference is itself the "WikiConference North America User Group". Organizations which are active in presenting the conference include Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia DC, Wikimedia NYC, and Wiki Cascadia. Individuals and other groups make major contributions to host the conference, including support throughout the year from groups listed at North American Wikimedians.

WikiConference North America is a volunteer project by Wikimedians, for Wikimedians. The Wikimedia Foundation has provided grant support to the conference in most years, except for 2015 when Wiki Education Foundation financially sponsored everything, and during the COVID pandemic when volunteers organized the conference virtually without funding. Major conference expenses include travel support for the scholarship program and the cost of the venue expenses. When there is hired staff, then they are with the venue operations so that attendees can use the space. Past WikiConference organizing teams have not included a paid conference organizer, but with the growing complexity and expectations of future events, for 2026 Wikimedia Canada is contributing part-time staff support to supplement volunteer organizing. There are always volunteer options for anyone who can commit to join meetings of the core organizing team. Scholarship recipients are asked to volunteer for some aspect of the live conference, such as by checking in attendees, or monitoring rooms while taking notes.

The conference is four days long, Thursday to Sunday. Thursday is the "culture crawl", which is a tour of the city with emphasis on knowledge institutions like archives. Wikipedians love visiting archives, and archivists both like giving tours to Wikipedians and frequently remark that they do not get many tour groups of people who are sincerely eager to see rooms of filing cabinets. Fridays attract the local working professionals who are only going to attend a conference during working hours, and Saturdays attract local Wikipedians and the wiki-curious who work weekdays, but are happy to attend on a weekend. The schedule design reflects the interest patterns of those groups. All the WikiConferences have included talks on being inclusive to demographics of editors who are underrepresented in Wikimedia projects; updates from the local elected representatives of major Wikimedia governance bodies like the Affiliations Committee or Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee; a presentation from someone at a library; a project to increase collaboration with another tech nonprofit community like Internet Archive or OpenStreetMap; a discussion about if and when and how to pay for language interpretation to make events accessible across French, English, and Spanish language communities; the perennial claim that very soon there is going to be a Wikimedia chapter which represents the United States; and some weird idea to do something amazing, but which has never been discussed before. The bonus topic since 2024 is AI, which now gets to be part of every presentation.

Sunday is time for visiting attendees to return home, but morning meetings till break in the afternoon are a time for strategic discussions on staying connected as groups of collaborators, and for reflecting on our place as individuals who get extraordinary and disproportionate media attention as compared to any other volunteer network of editors at any other time in history. Wikipedians who attend for the first time often remark that this in-person conference is the first time they have met any other Wikipedia editor in person.

As The Signpost reported in October 2025, the conference began with a gunman joining then-Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander on stage during the keynote presentation. While the gunman had the attention of hundreds of people in attendance at the keynote talk, two Wikimedia editors – Richard Knipel (user:Pharos) and Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) – heroically and physically subdued the person. There were no shots fired. Although some news reports stated that the gunman's objective was to shoot themselves, enough attendees reported that the gunman pointed the gun directly at their faces and made eye contact personally with them as he pondered what to do with his finger on the trigger, crazed, having chosen to come to this Wikimedia conference because of grievances about their past experience as a Wikimedia editor and wanting interaction with Wikipedia. This is the latest of the reported terrorism events at a Wikimedia convening, with the last one in this conference series being the bomb threat, reported November 2023 in The Signpost, which disrupted a day of WikiConference in Toronto.

While the gun threat left a strong impression on conference attendees, Wikipedia editors may not have convened on-wiki in discussion forums to discuss that incident in the usual way that editors discuss many things. If anyone has more thoughts about security at Wikimedia events generally, consider sharing your ideas in The Signpost starting with a visit to the newsroom's submissions forum. There is no committee or individual who is hosting public Wikimedia community discussions to develop Wikimedia security practices. This is a distasteful topic to discuss or think about. It is very difficult to determine what security practices are appropriate to discuss publicly and which are dangerous to disclose. Anyone interested to give a try at making a public on-wiki place to discuss Wikimedia volunteer community best practices for safety can give a try at establishing or developing forums or community organizations to do this. As always, WikiConference is a volunteer activity, and another way to increase the security is to increase the community participation. Anyone who wants to help organize, review submissions, or join any other planning committee may contact WikiConference North America.

It is with great sadness that we share that the Odia community has lost a valued contributor, Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, who passed away on 10 March following a brief illness.

Dr. Rout began contributing to Odia Wikipedia at the age of 68 and remained an active contributor for the past 14 years. During this time, he consistently added new content, significantly enriching the project, creating more than 3,500 articles, including over 2,500 articles on medical topics.

He also participated in several movement initiatives, including Wiki Project Med, where he was among the leading contributors in South Asia. As one of the top contributors to medical content worldwide, he received The Cure Award from Wiki Project Med for eight consecutive years.

On behalf of the Odia Wikipedia community, we extend our condolences to Dr. Rout's friends and family. His contributions to Odia Wikipedia are valued.

His contributions to the Wikimedia movement and to the availability of knowledge in Odia will be remembered. The Odia Wikimedians User Group invites those with condolences to share them on his user talk page.

• 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.

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  Training boat for cadets
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  Candidates who pass the bar exam may become janitors.
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  Morning assembly
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  Data stream monitoring unit
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  Screening for contraband edits
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  On the lookout for incidents
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  Historical photo of early janitors, circa 2002
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  Wikipedians are on watch 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
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  Emergency database change to read-only
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  Coordination centre
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  Counter-drone team watching for unauthorised bots
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  RCMP (Recent Changes Mobile Patrol) officer waiting for a deployment
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  Those accused of disruptive behaviour may be restricted or banished.
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  Rangers being alert in Alert
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  Marching band
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  Another type of Canadian Ranger
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  Officer uniforms
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  Briefing before searching for undisclosed paid editors
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  Examining a Wikipedia article's history for evidence
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  Checkusers on a routine investigation
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  Advanced training in deep learning
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  Network engineers work with a packet analyzer
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  Snack delivery for a hackathon
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  After years of experience, a ranger may take their final form.
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  Ordinary users may participate in making policy.
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  The official residence of User:Jimbo Wales
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  The stately building of the Arbitration Committee
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  Award given upon an honourable discharge