For the January 24 – February 24 period, per this database report.

Short descriptions are an important tool for readers, and we've come a long way since short descriptions were introduced. I think the community can meet our goal to make Wikipedia a more accessible resource!

Why are they important?

How can we make them better?

Short descriptions began use on the English Wikipedia back in 2018. According to the Short Descriptions WikiProject:

Short descriptions appear in Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches, and help users identify the desired article. When viewing an article, some mobile Wikipedia Apps also display the description below the page title.

Articles that are lacking a short description appear in search result lists simply by their titles, with no annotation. If all titles were self-evidently clear, it would be immediately obvious which one relates to the article of interest, but very often that is not the case. Titles alone can be ambiguous or otherwise not comprehensible to non-specialist readers, as well as to readers who are not fluent speakers of English.

That's pretty useful! Short descriptions are vital for many Wikipedia readers.

Most of Wikipedia's articles do have short descriptions by now ... however, as of February 2025, there are still ~770,000 articles that need short descriptions! To find out which ones do, you can simply use this search to get a list of all that don't. From there, you can refine your search to articles that are within your interests, or simply start adding descriptions to those that appear at the top of the list.

In a nutshell, short descriptions on Wikipedia must start with an uppercase letter, lack punctuation at the end, and be descriptive about the article in under forty characters (although you could go slightly above if necessary). Note that articles with self-explanatory titles can be marked as "none", showing they don't require a short description. Before you start adding short descriptions, learn what a good short description looks like by reading the formatting instructions and examples at Wikipedia's project page about short descriptions.

There are a couple of good tools you can use to assist you in short descriptions to articles. My favorites are the ShortDesc Helper (which you can enable under the "Gadgets" section of your preferences) and the Shortdescs-in-category script.

The ShortDesc Helper allows you to add short descriptions right from the article page without needing to go through the edit section. It can also show you the corresponding Wikidata description item for the article if one exists, and allow you to import and modify it for short descriptions. Note, however, that most Wikidata items will need to be modified while being imported, as Wikipedia has different guidelines from Wikidata for short descriptions, primarily around length.

The Shortdescs-in-category script allows you to see the articles in categories which need short descriptions, and those which don't.

I would like to put forward the following goal for the Wikipedia community: One year after this article is posted, every single article on Wikipedia will have a short description, or will be marked as not requiring one because the title is self-explanatory. It may seem lofty, but I think we can come together and complete short descriptions for all articles!

Benoît Evellin is a Senior Movement Communications Specialist (Product & Tech), and Ana Eira is a Movement Communications Specialist, for the Wikimedia Foundation.

When you click the "edit" button on a wiki, you're likely focused on improving the content. The process feels seamless: edit, save, repeat. From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running—in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoxes.

Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to another—essentially a backup. But why? In case of a crisis we can rely on the other datacenter.

The scheduled switchover process allows for essential maintenance and improvements at the backup center. It also allows the team to test their procedures, minimize the impact of the read-only time, and work on the overall reliability of the sites.

Thanks to Listen to Wikipedia, a playful tool that turns each edit into a sound and visualizes it as a floating bubble in real-time, you can actually hear the switchover take place. Before the switchover starts, you will hear the steady stream of edit sounds. But then—about 2 minutes in—the sound stops, which means the system has entered the read-only phase. And when the sounds start up again? That's the moment engineers can finally breathe—it's the clear signal that the toughest part of the switchover is done and edits are flowing again. Watch this video to experience that extraordinary moment.

This rare interruption happens because all Wikimedia wikis rely on a server designed specifically for their needs and managed by the Wikimedia Foundation. This setup allows us to remain independent, while delivering a reliable experience for users around the world.

The SRE team oversees a global network of datacenters, seven in total, spanning the United States, Singapore, the Netherlands, France, and, most recently, Brazil. These datacenters allow articles and other content to load quickly, securely, and privately, to be accessed anywhere and anytime.

At the heart of this network are the two application server groups which host the live copies of the projects. Having two application server groups is necessary to keep all the wikis we host alive: if one server fails, the second one can take over, and vice-versa. With an estimated 342 edits per minute happening on Wikipedia alone, having a backup server is a must.

While the switchover may sound simple, the reality is that the process has evolved significantly over the years.

Since its inception, the datacenter switchover has been refined and is now largely automated. What once took nearly an hour of read-only downtime now takes between 2 and 3 minutes–a significant leap forward in efficiency. But how did we get here?

It all started in 2015, when an increase in donations allowed the Foundation to allocate a larger budget to establish a second datacenter capable of hosting the core of our ecosystem, using MediaWiki, and all other services that make it work. To prove the new datacenter's capabilities, the SRE team had to test that all operations could be fully served from this new location.

The first switchover, in March 2016, was a big undertaking. It took six months of preparation and the effort of ten engineers. Beyond the technical groundwork, the Foundation shared the switchover timeline through banners, village pumps, and other outreach channels, keeping everyone informed.

During the process, a technical limitation in MediaWiki forced the SRE team to set the wikis to read-only mode for 45 minutes, followed by two hours of somewhat degraded performance. The wikis remained accessible, but no one could edit them. Shifting operations from a "warm" datacenter — already handling significant traffic — to a "cold" datacenter had noticeable impacts. The key takeaway? Regular switchover practice was essential.

By deciding to schedule switchovers regularly, the team wanted to guarantee that the backup center is always prepared to take over full operations in the event of an emergency. After each switchover, the new primary data center handles all traffic for a week, allowing time for essential maintenance and improvements at the secondary center. It also allows the team to test their procedures, diminish the impact of the read-only time, and work on the reliability of the sites.

Picking something memorable that does not particularly change across cultures, countries, hemispheres, jurisdictions, et cetera, allows more people to remember it and relate to it, making it more fitting to our global movement. Human-made things tend to vary a lot and have different connotations (including bad ones) across cultures, so we settled on something that has been close to a constant for humankind since times immemorial. That's an astronomical event that has been quite predictable by humankind for millennia: the solar equinox.

Keen-eyed Wikimedians will certainly note the traffic is not redirected precisely on the day of the equinox but on the Wednesday the week it happens, as it requires some preparation work. But it's easy for everyone to remember, whether it's editors, affiliates hosting events, or developers improving the platform's codebase.

The decision to align the system switchover with the equinoxes reflects both practicality and a nod to Principal Site Reliability Engineer Alexandros Kosiaris' passion for astronomy. The equinoxes aren't just a functional choice — they're an irresistible one, as they mark a natural rhythm that resonates with the team. As they like to say, edits "fly north in the spring and south in the fall", mirroring the migratory path of birds between datacenters.

To build resilience into this process and make sure all the right people know how to run it, the newest team member manages the switchover. A rite of passage that guarantees the process is thoroughly documented, easy to follow, and provides hands-on experience on one of the most critical operations. It's also a reminder that behind the editing experience of the Wikimedia projects is a team of dedicated engineers, constantly learning and improving.

So the next time you click "edit", know that behind that simple action lies a carefully maintained network that makes your contribution part of the world's shared knowledge — a collaboration of people and technology that makes the whole system work, unseen but essential.

If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, at 14:00 UTC.

This article was first published in the January 2025 This Month in GLAM – Africa Licensed CC-BY SA 4.0.

In 2015, Roel Coutinho, a well-known Dutch virologist, entered my office in a Leiden library. He was carrying a box with photographic slides, contact prints and negatives. He asked if I was interested in the photographs, and he explained that they had been taken in 1973 and 1974, adding, "The only time I ever took photos in my entire life". He then told me about the last anti-colonial revolution in Africa, namely the uprising of the people against the colonial Portuguese powers in Guinea-Bissau in the early 1970s. Coutinho was a young doctor from the Netherlands, at the time in his twenties. He had sympathy for the struggle against Portugal, he liked the adventure, and so he decided to travel from the Netherlands to Guinea-Bissau.

He was head of a small hospital in the Senegalese border town of Ziguinchor, lived among the rebels, learned the local language and, in March/April 1974, he walked for a month through the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. During this trip, he also took photographs of the bush hospitals, met Cuban doctors working there, and photographed the life of the population who were under constant danger of being bombed by the Portuguese. These photos are special for two reasons: they give a unique insight into daily life during a revolution, and furthermore, there are some people to be seen in the photos who later played an important part in the government of independent Guinea-Bissau: the future first president and future Prime Minister of the country.

We decided to digitize all 750 photos and make them available via Wikimedia Commons, with descriptions in English, Dutch and Portuguese. By doing this, we would make sure the heritage of the revolution in Guinea-Bissau would not be buried in a Dutch library, but also be available for people in Portugal and Guinea-Bissau. All photographs were digitized by a professional company and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by our Wikipedian in Residence in Leiden. A Portuguese-speaking student assistant added descriptions, in cooperation with Roel Coutinho himself. Further assistance from librarians at the African Studies Centre in Leiden was instrumental. The images were published in Commons under a Creative Commons license, so every photograph could be used easily by others. The Coutinho collection was now out in the open.

The photographs were soon used on various platforms. As expected, the rare photos of the later first prime-minister of Guinea-Bissau, Chico Mendes, and the future first president of G-B, Luís Cabral (indeed, brother of the even more famous Amílcar Cabral, who was murdered in January 1973), instantaneously drew attention. To our surprise, one of the other photos was used in the German-language Wikipedia as an illustration of the article about the jet injector (Impfpistole). Other photos were used in research publications about daily life in times of war. A Belgian professor even e-mailed for permission to use the photo of a breast-feeding mother in a book about breast-feeding itself. Sure!

• 
  Luís Cabral
• 
  Coutinho vaccinating
• 
  Armed escort carrying a wounded person
• 
  Francisco Mendes

When Coutinho mentioned that he had kept a diary during these years (1973–1974), we looked at how we could make this rare document available. In 2022, the African Studies Centre in Leiden published the Dutch edition of Coutinho's diary from the '70s, together with an introduction (looking back in retrospective) and 40 photographs. The booklet is now freely available.

Two years later, the book was translated into Portuguese by Arie Pos and subsequently published in December 2024. It may come as no surprise that this publication is also openly available online. Several paper copies have also been sent to Bissau, in order to make this part of the revolutionary heritage of Guinea-Bissau accessible to the people of the country.

• Portuguese edition online: Roel Coutinho: A luta pela libertação da Guiné-Bissau, vista pelos olhos de um jovem médico neerlandês. Voorschoten, Editora Couto, 2024
• Dutch edition online: Roel Coutinho: De vrijheidsstrijd van Guinee-Bissau door de ogen van een jonge dokter. Leiden, African Studies Centre, 2022. ISBN 9789054481959.

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

This preprint^[1] (a draft chapter for an upcoming "Handbook of Computational Social Science") offers

"a comprehensive overview of what is known about the three steps that characterize navigation on Wikipedia: (1) how readers reach the platform, (2) how readers navigate the platform, and (3) how readers leave the platform. Finally, we discuss open problems and opportunities for future research in this field."

Regular readers of this research update might already have encountered many of the publications covered. But this article (fairly succinct at 19 pages) should provide a very useful bookmark for anyone interested in the topic area.

A section on "Readers' motivations and content popularity" discusses why readers access Wikipedia, e.g. "learning more about current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom", and how these motivations are "associated with four categories of behaviors described as exploration, focus, trending, and passing." Another strain of research identified different kinds of readers among those motivated by curiosity, by how they navigate the link network of Wikipedia articles: "Hunters" pursue knowledge in a focused way by zooming in on a tightly connected set of concepts, whereas "busybodies" explore a more loosely connected network (cf. our earlier coverage). The same authors recently followed up on their earlier lab experiment with a much larger study^[2] based on a "naturalistic population of 482,760 readers using Wikipedia's mobile app in 14 languages from 50 countries or territories", where they replicated "the nomadic 'busybody' and the targeted 'hunter'" but also "find evidence for another style—the 'dancer'—which was previously predicted by a historico-philosophical examination of texts over two millennia and is characterized by creative modes of knowledge production."

The "How readers reach Wikipedia" chapter reminds one about the continuing importance of Google for Wikipedia's popularity: "Search engines are responsible for most of the incoming traffic received by Wikipedia, representing the preferred way to access its content. Almost 78% of the incoming traffic to Wikipedia originated from search engines." It also covers results on temporal patterns, e.g. how consumption differs between weekdays and weekends, and between working hours and the rest of the day.

Among the other chapters, "How readers leave Wikipedia" discusses some findings about reader clicks on references and other kinds of external links.

Reader privacy is an important limitation to this kind of research. A "data sources" section discusses that while many of these findings covered in the overview rely (apart from small-scale lab studies, custom instrumentations and the aforementioned data from the mobile Wikipedia apps) on researcher access to the Wikimedia Foundation's internal server logs, the anonymized public "Wikipedia clickstream" data enables external research as well. Unlike what is usually understood as clickstream in the industry though, the "Wikipedia clickstream" data doesn't contain full sequences of readers navigating between pages. A 2022 paper^[3] examined how much that anonymization limits the usefulness of the data, by reconstructing synthetic navigation sequences from the public Wikipedia clickstream data and comparing them with the real server logs: "Overall, we find that the differences between real and synthetic sequences are statistically significant, but with small effect sizes, often well below 10%. This constitutes quantitative evidence for the utility of the Wikipedia clickstream data as a public resource: clickstream data can closely capture reader navigation on Wikipedia and provides a sufficient approximation for most practical downstream applications relying on reader data." Still, perhaps unsurprisingly, a large part of the publications cited in the new overview chapter are authored or coauthored by WMF employees and their academic collaborators who had access to the internal server logs.

The overview limits itself to navigation to and between Wikipedia articles as a whole. Much less is known on how readers navigate within Wikipedia articles.

Relatedly, a March 2024 WMF staff presentation summarized "5 new learnings from our research on readers", not all of which appear to have made it into the published academic literature yet:

• "Information needs vary over time" (referring, e.g., to the findings about circadian variations mentioned above)
• "Much of the existing content is invisible" (e.g. because articles are orphaned, cf. below)
• "Readability is a major barrier" (cf. below)
• "Our readers are disproportionately young, educated, and men"
• "Readers create accounts to read" (i.e. not just to edit Wikipedia)

From the abstract:^[4]

"[...] previous investigations of the readability of Wikipedia have been restricted to English only, and there are currently no systems supporting the automatic readability assessment of the 300+ languages in Wikipedia. To bridge this gap, we develop a multilingual model to score the readability of Wikipedia articles. To train and evaluate this model, we create a novel multilingual dataset spanning 14 languages, by matching articles from Wikipedia to [Simple] Wikipedia and online children encyclopedias [including Klexikon]. We show that our model performs well in a zero-shot scenario, yielding a ranking accuracy of more than 80% across 14 languages and improving upon previous benchmarks. These results demonstrate the applicability of the model at scale for languages in which there is no ground-truth data available for model fine-tuning. Furthermore, we provide the first overview on the state of readability in Wikipedia beyond English."

The "Related work" section reports that traditional methods of automated readability assessment (ARA, such as the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests which have been used in several prior studies on Wikipedia's readability) are being supplanted by "by approaches using language models based on deep neural networks" recently. These are largely still confined to English and even among those studies that cover non-English languages, most still "focus only on a single language, with few exceptions attempting to model several languages jointly". The authors address this gap by "taking advantage of the more general findings that multilingual transformer models, such as mBERT [multilingual BERT ...], perform surprisingly well at zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning for a wide range of tasks outside ARA". They appear to be confident enough in their resulting model to include a comparison of its readability scores for 24 Wikipedia language versions, which indicates that Italian Wikipedia is the most difficult to read (and Simple Wikipedia the easiest, as expected).

The paper is the outcome of a research project (launched in 2021) by the Wikimedia Foundation's research team with external collaborators, alongside a public API hosted by WMF. Like the "Edisum" model for model for automatically generating Wikipedia edit summaries that we covered in our last issue, its approach seems to have been shaped and limited by the Wikimedia Foundation's GPU compute constraints. The "Limitations" section notes that:

"[...] larger models with more parameters, such as mLongT5 [...], could yield even better performance. However, the necessary infrastructure (especially in terms of GPUs) required for training and inference makes it challenging to provide the model as a ready-to-use tool."

From the abstract:^[5]

"[...] we analyse a large dataset of citations from the English Wikipedia and model the role of open access in Wikipedia's citation patterns. Our findings reveal that Wikipedia relies on open access articles at a higher overall rate (44.1%) compared to their availability in the Web of Science (23.6%) and OpenAlex (22.6%). Furthermore, both the accessibility (open access status) and academic impact (citation count) significantly increase the probability of an article being cited on Wikipedia. Specifically, open access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia, as they show an approximately 64.7% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when compared to paywalled articles, after controlling for confounding factors. This open access citation effect is particularly strong for articles with high citation counts or published in recent years."

A 2018 study^[6] focused on medical articles had similarly found "that Wikipedia favors OA articles, although a large number of cited articles are non-OA."

Among the new paper's other results is a comparison by academic subject area. History and art stand out as the disciplines with the lowest percentage of open access citations on Wikipedia, with biology and physics having the highest:

• WikiNLP CfP: Submissions are open until April 23 for WikiNLP 2025, a workshop "at ACL 2025 (https://2025.aclweb.org/) that will be focused on celebrating Wikimedia's contributions to the natural language processing (NLP) community and highlighting approaches to ensuring the sustainability of this relationship for years to come." (See also below regarding the first edition of the WikiNLP workshop held last year.)
• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

From the abstract:^[7]

"we conduct the first systematic study of orphan articles, which are articles without any incoming links from other Wikipedia articles, across 319 different language versions of Wikipedia. We find that a surprisingly large extent of content, roughly 15% (8.8M) of all [60 million] articles, is de facto invisible to readers navigating Wikipedia, and thus, rightfully term orphan articles as the dark matter of Wikipedia. We also provide causal evidence through a quasi-experiment that adding new incoming links to orphans (de-orphanization) leads to a statistically significant increase of their visibility in terms of the number of pageviews. We further highlight the challenges faced by editors for de-orphanizing articles, demonstrate the need to support them in addressing this issue, and provide potential solutions for developing automated tools based on cross-lingual approaches."

Specifically, the authors developed a tool (https://linkrec.toolforge.org/ ) that "aims to increase the visibility of articles [by generating] recommendations of articles from where to link to them. We identify recommendations by looking up the corresponding article in other Wikipedia languages."

See also:

• Thread by one of the authors
• University announcement
• Conference poster
• Presentation (video) at Wiki Workshop 2024

Three papers from the "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia ("WikiNLP") at last year's EMNLP conference (see also our earlier review of another paper from the same workshop):

From the abstract:^[8]

"we provide a review of the different ways in which Wikimedia data is curated to use in NLP tasks across pre-training, post-training, and model evaluations. We point to opportunities for greater use of Wikimedia content but also identify ways in which the language modeling community could better center the needs of Wikimedia editors. In particular, we call for incorporating additional sources of Wikimedia data, a greater focus on benchmarks for LLMs that encode Wikimedia principles, and greater multilingualism in Wikimedia-derived datasets."

From the abstract:^[9]

"we first provide a systematic analysis of similarities and discrepancies between legitimate and hoax Wikipedia articles, and introduce HOAXPEDIA, a collection of 311 hoax articles (from existing literature and official Wikipedia lists), together with semantically similar legitimate articles, which together form a binary text classification dataset aimed at fostering research in automated hoax detection. [...] Our results suggest that detecting deceitful content in Wikipedia based on content alone is hard but feasible, and complement our analysis with a study on the differences in distributions in edit histories, and find that looking at this feature yields better classification results than context."

From the abstract:^[10]

"We study how differences in persuasive language across Wikipedia articles, written in either English and Russian, can uncover each culture's distinct perspective on different subjects. We develop a large language model (LLM) powered system to identify instances of persuasive language in multilingual texts. [...] We [...] apply our approach to a large-scale, bilingual dataset of Wikipedia articles (88K total) [...] to find instances of persuasion. We quantify the amount of persuasion per article, and explore the differences in persuasion through several experiments on the paired articles. Notably, we generate rankings of articles by persuasion in both languages. These rankings match our intuitions on the culturally-salient subjects; Russian Wikipedia highlights subjects on Ukraine, while English Wikipedia highlights the Middle East. Grouping subjects into larger topics, we find politically-related events contain more persuasion than others."

From the abstract:^[11]

We conducted an interview study with 13 expert Wikipedians involved in the Russo-Ukrainian War topic area on the English-language edition of Wikipedia. While our participants did not perceive there to be clear evidence of a state-backed information operation, they agreed that war-related articles experienced high levels of disruptive editing from both Russia-aligned and Ukraine-aligned accounts. The English-language edition of Wikipedia had existing policies and processes at its disposal to counter such disruption. State-backed or not, the disruptive activity created time-intensive maintenance work for our participants. Finally, participants considered English-language Wikipedia to be more resilient than social media in preventing the spread of false information online.

From the abstract:^[12]

"[...] While existing research [on Wikipedia citations] predominantly focuses on the articles themselves, this study explores the unique citation dynamics within talk pages. Utilising data from the Wikipedia Knowledge Graph, Crossref Event Data, and OpenAlex, we examine the characteristics and patterns of citations within these collaborative discussions. Preliminary findings suggest that talk pages, although less frequented than main articles, engage deeply with scholarly outputs, often discussing them without necessarily transferring these citations to the main article content. This underscores the distinct consumption patterns on talk pages and their importance in shaping public and scholarly discourse on Wikipedia."

See also a thread by one of the authors

From the abstract:^[13]

"[...] this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writers, paying specific attention to their sense of ownership. While previous research has shown that editors engage in individualist editing practices at times, often ignoring community-mediated policy regarding ownership, findings from a mixed-method survey of 117 [English Wikipedia] editors demonstrate the existence of both "individual" and "community" notions of ownership that often reinforce, or mutually inform, each other."

The authors highlight that the WP:OWNERSHIP policy explicitly disclaims any individual ownership of content, but state that "policy and practice in Wikipedia do not always align". Still, such deviations appear limited - from the "Discussion" section:

While there is evidence to show that some editors understand their contributions in terms of individual ownership, correlational data demonstrate that a "sense of control" is actually informed by a process of external validation by other editors. Furthermore, evidence for an emergent community ownership model may be based on the results related to circumstances in which Wikipedia editors showed strong agreement, which were all related to a sense of community ownership [...]. Such findings support a community ownership model in which the writer places importance on a distributed and collaborative writing product, "assumes good faith" of other editors, and experiences validation when their writing is incorporated or positively responded to.

Ümüt Çınar was a Turkish linguist who specialized in plant and animal names (archived homepage). He also investigated connections between Turkic and Eskimo-Aleut languages (see "The Turkic Tracks in an Eskimo Language 2010"). He contributed to the Turkish Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, and several Wikipedia projects, starting in 2010. He created over 2,000 articles on the Turkish Wikipedia. On the English Wikipedia, his article creations include Rheum ribes (Syrian rhubarb), Tanana Athabaskans, and Yupʼik dance. He died after a brief illness on July 16, 2024. He was 59 years old.

Vinícius Medina Kern was a Brazilian professor, who had been working in the Department of Information Science at the Federal University of Santa Catarina since August 2010. He made significant scholarly contributions to the fields of Wikimedia and education, including his article "A Wikipédia como fonte de informação de referência: avaliação e perspectivas", which examines the quality and relevance of scientific contributions to Wikimedia projects. He was also an active participant in the Brazilian network focused on Wikipedia and education, having presented on this engagement during a workshop for wiki educators in 2021. Vinícius Medina Kern passed away on August 6, 2024, also at the age of 59.

After a long process of discussion and consensus brought us the first-ever crop of SecurePoll-elected administrators last November (see Signpost coverage of the creation of the process and its first trial), the first set of requests for comment regarding the administrator elections (AELECT) process have come to an end, having reached the following key conclusions:

• The pass percentage will remain at 70%.
• There will not be a limit on the number of candidates who can run in each election.
• Elections will be scrutineered by three CheckUsers from the English Wikipedia.
• An official voter guide for each election will not be made; the main election page will host a link to a list of unofficial guides, instead.
• Editors will be required to be extended confirmed to vote in elections, the same requirement as for standard RfAs.
• Candidates will require at least 20 votes in support to meet the pass threshold.
• Nominations must be made within a specific window of time before the election.
• Candidates will be ordered alphabetically, both on the election page and in SecurePoll.
• The discussion phase will last five days and occur prior to the voting phase.
• Unsuccessful candidates will not be restricted from running in future elections.
• Ideally, elections will be held every five months, with no minimum number of candidates.

A second RFC has now begun to decide whether the admin election process will become permanent or will be discontinued. As part of the discussion, three options have been brought to the table: do not hold future elections, approve a second trial run, or unconditionally approve future elections. As of the time of writing, the RFC has not concluded, but consensus seems to be trending towards unconditional approval. – QJR

An open letter has been created on the French Wikipedia in response to reports of harassment against a long-term contributor, known as FredD, by Erwan Seznec, a journalist for the French news magazine Le Point. An English translation of the letter, which has collected over 1000 signatures as of February 25, can be found in this issue's Community view.

Seznec emailed FredD on February 15, threatening to contact his employer and publicly reveal his identity because of a dispute relating to FredD's edits to the French Wikipedia article about Le Point; he had specifically added content about the magazine's denial of the existence of climate change. Back in December 2024, Seznec had also written an article for Le Point revealing personal details about several other editors.

Seznec has already published another article on the same magazine responding to this open letter. This response, however, is simply yet another bias complaint, going so far as to threaten legal action against FredD. His attempts at intimidation have also been publicly commented by the president of Wikimédia France, Antoine Srun, who denounced the magazine's threats.

On February 17, Le Point's lawyers also sent a formal notice to the Wikimedia Foundation, alleging, among other things, that Wikipedia is in violation of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), and "questioning the very functioning of Wikipedia" (as reported by Marianne).

On February 20, Le Point published a petition of its own, whose signatories include four former ministers, two former presidents of the National Assembly, editors, journalists, an important Publicis board member (Élisabeth Badinter), a former member of the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel, and a number of well-known intellectuals. The petition expresses "deep concern about unopposed campaigns of systematic denigration by anonymous activists". The full list of signatories (as of 26 February), with links to their respective fr.wp entries, can be found here: (permalink).

Sadly, intimidation of Wikipedians is not a new issue. This has been a major issue in India lately, with another similar incident occurring on the English Wikipedia last year, resulting in an open letter that received over 1300 signatures and an ongoing court case; plus, there is another ongoing issue regarding the encyclopedia's coverage of an Indian historical figure – see this issue's In the media for the latter case. It has also recently been revealed that US-headquartered Heritage Foundation developed a plan to "identify and target" Wikipedia contributors (see prior Signpost coverage). – QJR, H, SR

On February 18, Wikimedia Commons achieved one billion GET — at least as measured by revision IDs. Revision 1,000,000,000 was contributed by User:DPLA bot, and consisted of uploading a photo of a house in Central Ohio — without further information about the image's subject, except for the title "Powhatan Ave" — as part of a contribution by the Columbus Metropolitan Library facilitated by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The selection process for the ombuds commission has concluded. This commission investigates violations of the privacy policy and use of CheckUser and Oversight tools across projects. The commission will consist of 12 members and one Steward-Observer, with new members being set to serve in the position for two years.

The newly selected members are:

• User:Galahad
• User:Revi C.
• User:Teles
• User:Zafer
• User:Vermont (Steward-Observer) – term expiring in 2026

Further information on all the members of the commission can be found at the page for the official meta announcement. – S

The annual review for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is currently ongoing. Editors are encouraged to leave comments and feedback on different aspects of the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC), as well as the enforcement guidelines and the U4C Charter. It is not currently clear how long this feedback process will go on for, or what the future steps from here will look like. This review process is necessary before the UCoC charter or any associated pages can be modified, since they were first ratified by the various bodies.

The U4C also added Jacob Rogers, an Associate General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a non-voting member. – S

The 2025 Steward Elections are currently ongoing on meta. There are 9 eligible candidates currently standing for elections, and the voting phase will continue until 27 February, being held via public vote, similar to our RfAs. Voters can check their eligibility for voting through this Toolforge page.

Also as part of the steward elections, all 32 current stewards are currently being evaluated for confirmation. Every current steward goes through this confirmation process on a yearly basis; once the current community consultation is completed, the right may be removed by a majority vote of other stewards. – S

The Global Resource Distribution Committee (GRDC), proposed by the Board of Trustees earlier last year, has started its nomination process on meta. The Committee will consist of eight volunteers (one for each region), one thematic volunteer, two nominees from affiliates, and two nominees from WMF; selected nominees will serve for two years. Nominations for the Interim GRDC were open until February 25; the selection process started the following day, with the final announcement being due on March 19.

The committee is theoretically responsible for managing the Wikimedia Community Fund, overseeing the Regional Fund Committees and advising the WMF on funding and grants. The Signpost last covered this subject back in August 2024, when the WMF Board of Trustees had first announced the GDRC as part of its three experimental measures in lieu of passing the Movement Charter.

Among the aforementioned measures, there was also the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC), which was first appointed in 2024 for a one-year pilot phase – see prior Signpost coverage from the 19 October issue. The council is supposed to advise the WMF on product and technology development over the long term.

Following a recent meeting, the PTAC published its draft recommendations: of four potential directions, PTAC recommended prioritizing the mobile contributor experience. Feedback for this specific recommendation can be left on its talk page. – S

Addendum - A few hours after the nomination process ended, WMF staffer User:JVargas (WMF) announced that the nomination process was being extended from 26 February to 31 March. This pushes back the announcement of the GRDC to late April. At least one candidate has chosen to withdraw from the process over this, with others expressing confusion over the changes. – S

News from WMF and the rest of the movement have arrived via the WMF's January Newsletter. Nine Wikimedia Conference proposals were approved for 2025. The WMF Research Team published their report on administrator recruitment and attrition as a 70-page document. The WMF Board of Trustees appointed Lorenzo Losa as its Chair-Elect.

News from the February newsletter includes the Wikimedia Foundation joining the TAROCH Coalition – TAROCH stands for "Towards an Open Cultural Heritage Recommendation" – a campaign led by Creative Commons to advocate for access to open culture and knowledge. WMF Legal is collecting examples of banner and logo changes in local projects; Wikimedians may submit them on the project's meta page. The executive team from the WMF, including CEO Maryana Iskander, has published an email reflecting on 2025 and summarising their last year of work.

The Thirduary newsletter includes the newly-launched Community Updates module from the Growth team, similar to the other "Community Configuration" tools. Launched in February, the module allows admins to deliver updates on Wikiprojects and events directly to newcomers' "homepages". Wikimedia Enterprise, a service maintained by WMF (see prior Signpost coverage), has partnered with "green" search engine Ecosia. March will also be the month for Celebrate Women, with cross project events to bridge the gender gap. Finally, the Affiliations Committee has officially recognised Wikimedia Brasil as a Chapter and Wikimedia Community User Group South Sudan as a user group. – S

• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones in February 2025:
  • • 1,000 articles: Central Kanuri Wikipedia
    • 2,000 articles: Tswana Wikipedia
    • 5,000 articles: Norman Wikipedia
    • 10,000 articles: Saraiki Wikipedia

• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Jewish deli, followed by Kerosene (beginning 3 March). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

"The end of the world" is a heck of a headline. The Signpost will not be able to cover that story, of course: after the event, there would be no reporters to write up the story, and no readers left to read it. But it would literally be the ultimate story for any journalist. In this issue, we instead cover several stories on things that might some day bring about the penultimate issue of The Signpost.

The Guardian covers how Wikipedia covers how the world might end. If you need a musical warmup for this, listen to In the year 2525. The more serious stories we cover might fit under the heading The end of Wikipedia as we know it, such as another Indian government that wants to dictate changes to a Wikipedia article, ANI, and Elon Musk's antics. These are difficult times, but I have faith that Wikipedians are up to the challenge. – S

The Guardian's Internet Wormhole column examines some Wikipedia pages about the fate of everything, including the disappearance of the Y chromosome in the Timeline of the far future. At least we have a Boltzmann brain to look forward to.

The Guardian article starts with 719 BC and continues to 2026, and then just keeps on going. From the 24th century onwards, apparently, "things start to get really trippy: a 'negative equinoctial paradox' in 2353, every person in Japan having the same surname by 2531, and 'the 639-year-long performance of John Cage's organ work As Slow as Possible' concluding in 2640".

Then, it moves on to Timeline of the far future and, for the "truly adventurous", the Ultimate fate of the universe, where readers can handily choose their favorite apocalyptic scenario between Big Freeze, Big Crunch, Big Bounce, Big Rip or Big Slurp. Just take your time and enjoy it. – S

As reported by 404 Media – the article has also been discussed in audio format on YouTube (at 31:15 – 50:00) – the Wikimedia Foundation "is building new tools that it hopes will help Wikipedia editors stay anonymous in part to avoid harassment and legal threats." Despite the "new" claim, most of the specific examples described in the article have either existed or been in the works for a long time already.

Italian online newspaper Il Post also covered the news (in Italian), explaining how:

Wikipedia [...] is notoriously written and edited by a community of volunteer users; everyone, with a bit of training, can contribute to it. Normally, editors are anonymous users who draw little attention: in recent years, however, physical and legal threats have risen up, especially against those who edit about potentially controversial topics, such as Wikipedia articles related to science and politics.
— Il Post (translated and re-adapted)

Two recent examples of these instances include three editors who are currently involved in the Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation court case – see previous Signpost coverage – and another one over at the French Wikipedia who has reportedly faced multiple threats by a journalist for his edits to the article of newspaper Le Point – see this issue's News and Notes.

Still, the most worrying signs so far have come from the United States: the Signpost previously wrote about the Heritage Foundation's supposed plan to "identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position", and published an Op-ed by user GorillaWarfare on efforts by figures like Elon Musk and outlets like Pirate Wires to discredit Wikipedia and its editors, as well as pressure from right-wing activists like Libs of TikTok; this last matter has also been discussed by Lila Shroff in The Atlantic (free subscription required). The editorial board of the New York Post, on February 5, directly exhorted "Big Tech" to "block Wikipedia until it stops censoring and pushing disinformation", at least partially based on its objections to Wikipedia's sourcing policies, and presented alongside a slew of bias complaints. While some are colorable and some are risible — and all certainly deserving at least a response — direct calls for suppression are nonetheless significant and dramatic.

That being said, as noted by 404 Media, the WMF has already acknowledged the general trends at play here in the "External Trends" section of their 2024-2025 annual plan, which states:

Human rights threats are growing. Physical and legal threats against volunteers and staff who fight disinformation continue to grow. Accusations of bias and inaction by those whose preferred narratives do not prevail on Wikipedia may be encouraged and amplified by purveyors of disinformation.

[...]

Law is weaponized in important jurisdictions. Bad-faith lawsuits, by people who don’t like the verified information appearing on Wikipedia pages, are succeeding in some European countries. Some incumbent leaders are abusing their powers to silence and intimidate political opponents.

Concerns from Wikimedia executives only appear to have intensified ever since, as proven by several recent public declarations lined up by 404 Media. During an online meeting with the Board of Trustees on January 30, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that he considered rising threats to Wikipedia by Musk and other figures as "something we need to grapple with", while the WMF CEO, Maryana Iskander, told the Trustees, "We're all just trying to understand what is happening not only in the United States, [but across the world], so the best we can do is monitor, check-in on staff, and try to understand what's needed". Iskander also added that the Foundation was going to "do a risk assessment for community conferences for Wikimania", in order to ensure the safety of people gathering at in-person events.

Two Wikimedia lawyers, Phil Bradley-Schmieg and Jacob Rogers, shared more details on the WMF's most plausible plans to enhance user protection, especially in regards to unregistered users. During the aforementioned meeting, Bradley-Schmieg mentioned the Foundation's ongoing work on the "Temporary Accounts program" – begun in 2019, previously under the name "IP Masking" – which would hand logged-out users a temporary username to hide their IP address, so that it could be accessible "only to people who are really engaged in anti-vandalism". See also prior Signpost coverage: "News from WMF" (2024-11-06), "Mandatory IP masking" (2020-11-01).

In a separate meeting with Community Resilience and Sustainability, also held on January 30, Rogers suggested the possibility to extend the use of sockpuppet accounts to a wider number of non-English Wikimedia projects, while also noting that the WMF had been working to limit the amount of data they retain on any given user – for instance, IP addresses associated with edits are deleted or anonymized after 90 days. According to the Foundation's most recent transparency report, in the first six months of 2024 it received 26 formal requests for information on users, six of which came from the United States, the highest number of any jurisdiction. They provided information in just two cases, one of which was from the US, and the other from Sweden.

As summarized by 404 Media, Rogers also said that WMF has "created a legal defense program that will in some cases fund the defense of Wikipedia editors who are attacked through the legal system, as long as that editor or staffer was contributing to a Wikimedia project in good faith" (presumably a reference to the "Wikimedia Foundation Legal Fees Assistance Program," launched in 2012). The Foundation has recently fought cases in India (the aforementioned ANI vs. WMF) and Germany.

During one of the meetings, upon being asked if the Foundation would consider moving its headquarters out of the US – since it’s currently based in San Francisco – Rogers said:

[Such a decision] would probably not do very much, because the projects would remain accessible in the United States, and many things would still be subject to US law even if the foundation moved its headquarters to a different jurisdiction.

[...]

I think a move would be extremely expensive and cost something in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. [...] I see that as one of the most significant, expensive, and extreme possible options. You would only do that if it was like, the only solution to a major problem where doing that would make sense.

Neither the Wikimedia Foundation, nor the Heritage Foundation responded to a request for comment by 404 Media. – O, S, B, H, J

An editor has apparently partially submitted to demands of the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell of the Maharashtra Police, to remove allegedly derogatory remarks about Hindu king Sambhaji from Wikipedia. Editor Ratnahastin stated, "I have been sued, legal issues refers to the troubles I'm facing. It is not a threat," after removing edits they had previously made and promising not to revert edits others have made (including those who reverted Ratnahastin's self-reverts). He also said that he had previously contacted Trust and Safety for assistance.

Sambhaji was the king of the Maratha Empire who led the war against the Muslim Mughal Empire in the 1680s. He is revered by many Indians, in much the same way that citizens of many other countries revere their own patriotic or national heroes.

Soon after a new biopic about Sambhaji, titled Chhaava, was released worldwide on February 14, the Indian press – e.g. The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and India Today – began reporting on complaints about the English Wikipedia article about Sambhaji. According to the sources, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis instructed the local police to have the "derogatory remarks" removed from Wikipedia.

The film, like most biopics, is not meant to be a neutral piece of non-fiction; it was adapted from the historical novel Chhava by Shivaji Sawant. As reported by a Hindustan Times story, the director of the film had his own discussions with politicians about a dance scene, which can only be seen now in the movie trailer. The folk dance, known as lezim, is athletic and energetic; in the trailer, it's also emotional, perhaps excessively so, but not pornographic or otherwise immoral. The HT report about the controversy is vague about the reason for the removal of the dance scene, and the somewhat more-extravagant scenes in the HT's own video about the dance scene's removal have now also been locked out of the web. Much of this information arrived bit by bit, and was being discussed and digested at WP:ANI as early as February 18.

On February 21, several Indian sources reported that four or five Indian editors have been "booked" or had "a case registered" against them in court.

Ratnahastin began removing information that same day, while mentioning legal problems in his edit comments. At his own user talk, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was questioned about the matter. He responded:

[W]hen legal threats against individual users are involved, it is wise for the WMF to be very circumspect about what statements they issue and what actions they are taking. User privacy matters a great deal, and user safety (both against such threats but also the potential social media witch hunt that can easily emerge) is paramount. It's generally a mistake to assume that because the wider community can't be brought into confidential discussions and actions of the legal team, those discussions and actions aren't taking place.--
— User:Jimbo Wales 13:14, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

– S, B

• Meet WikiTok: informative, wholesome, and better than chewing gum: On February 5, New York-based app developer Isaac Gemal launched a new web app, WikiTok, which allows for viewing Wikipedia pages as if they were a TikTok feed: the news have been covered by Ars Technica, as well as The Washington Post, in "What if TikTok and Wikipedia had a baby?" (pay-walled). The Ars Technica article provides a particularly interesting insight on how WikiTok works, and even reached out to Gemal himself, who broke down how AI coding tools such as Claude and Cursor "helped [him] ship really, really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling." What Gemal seemingly does not want to capitalize on, though, is hyper-personalized and addictive content: he actually posted the whole code on GitHub, so that anyone can contribute to WikiTok and improve it further, and said quote, "We're already ruled by ruthless, opaque algorithms in our everyday life; why can't we just have one little corner in the world without them?"

• I won't be afraid, just as long as you stand, stand by me: Wikipedia and Commons contributor Funcrunch recently wrote a piece for trans news organization Assigned Media on how "Wikipedia is a Bulwark Against Disinformation" on trans topics, and how editors are dealing with anti-trans vandalism, coverage of legislative push-back from the Trump administration – including EO 14168 and EO 14187 – and the development of WikiProject LGBTQ+ studies. Fellow Wikipedia users Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist and Tamzin were interviewed for the article, and GorillaWarfare's recent interview with CNN was also cited.

• But what about COI guidelines?: KFDX-TV and KJTL both reported that the CEO of Wichita Falls, Texas Chamber of Commerce, Ron Kitchens, said that updating the city's Wikipedia article would be "an excellent opportunity to paint the city in a new light".

• Larry Sanger's conversion: Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has officially described himself as a Christian, as stated in a recent post on his blog and in multiple religious publications. Formerly an agnostic, Sanger has already documented his religious shift in recent years.

• Meta sues alleged violent extortionist for holding Instagram accounts hostage: 404 Media strikes again, having reported that Meta is suing Idriss Qibaa, the perpetrator of the "Unlocked 4 Life" extortion scheme directed towards at least 200 Instagram users. Sound familiar?

• Clicks and crore — whatever you call it, that's a lot: The Wikipedia article Kumbh Mela — documenting the largest human gathering in the world — recorded 22 lakh pageviews on the English Wikipedia in January 2025 (2,202,934 by our count). Just in India, there were 3.06 crore impressions via Google (30 million) and 10.5 lakh clicks (over one million) in January, according to the The Times of India, for a 3.4% click-through rate (that's high).

• Voor de poppenspeler, zie Max Verstappen (poppenspeler), or Max Verstappen, the famous chicken puppeteer: As per F1-centered portal GPblog, there was an apparent duplicate article on race driver Max Verstappen over at the Dutch Wikipedia, at least for a while, who had another career as a chicken puppeteer... or maybe, it was just another person who happened to have the same name.

• Minding the gap: Sky TG24 journalist Roberta Cavaglià wrote about "Wikipedia's long walk towards gender equality" (in Italian, behind pay-wall), describing the various initiatives that have helped reduce the content gender gap on Wikipedia, including WikiProject Women in Red, as women's biographies have recently reached 20% of all biographies – see previous Signpost coverage.

• Edit history: A new feature on D. F. Lovett's Substack newsletter covers — what else? — the edit history of the Wikipedia article on Blake Lively, and what it means in the context of a smear campaign that had allegedly been perpetrated against the actress. Who knew that an edit history could be so lively?

• Squeezed from both sides: Fast Company has a story not just about Wikipedia coming under fire from the right, which we have covered in substantial detail before, but contends that "Wikipedia is at the center of language politics", with both left and right trying to "win" in its pages.

This is an open letter from members of the French community of Wikipedia editors, protesting the threatened doxing of one of their peers by a journalist from a French magazine, Le Point, which has already responded to this open letter. Antoine Srun, the President of Wikimédia France, has officially endorsed the letter, stating "Wikimédia France will always stand alongside the Wikipedia volunteer community to defend it, protect it and help it in its missions of free access to all knowledge." User Jules*, who helped organize this effort, told The Signpost that Wikipedians who haven't previously contributed to the French Wikipedia can now add their own signatures, as well. - S

We, volunteers contributing to Wikipedia in French, give our full support to our colleague FredD, the target of intimidating emails by a journalist from magazine Le Point, threatening to reveal his identity and profession. In this letter, we wish to recall the importance of respecting the pseudonymity of Wikipedia volunteers, as well as the operating principles of the collaborative encyclopedia.

On Saturday, February 15, after contributing to the Wikipedia article about the magazine Le Point,^[1] FredD, a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia for 18 years, who has made more than 30,000 edits, had the very unpleasant surprise of receiving an email sent from the professional address of Erwan Seznec, a journalist at Le Point, which included the following comments: "We are going to write an article about you, on our site, giving your identity, your position, and requesting an official reaction from [FredD's supposed employer]." The same journalist also obtained FredD's personal telephone number and contacted him through that means.

The statements made in these emails are explicitly threatening and are, as such, completely unacceptable. Editorial disagreements, which are quite common on Wikipedia, are settled by debates on the discussion page of the article in question, in accordance with the rules of etiquette.

These threatening remarks come after the dissemination of supposed personal information about several other volunteer contributors in an article in Le Point.^[2]

These procedures, unprecedented in the mainstream French press, do not fall within the scope of free criticism, to which Wikipedia is regularly subjected — which is perfectly legitimate. They do not seem to us to respect the ethics of journalism or to be part of a journalistic approach for the citizens' right to information, but rather to fall within the scope of score-settling or intimidation. They pose a problem on several counts:

• They are likely to expose our editors to harassment — which we regularly encounter — and can even endanger Internet users who voluntarily participate in the construction of the encyclopedia;
• They are likely to, through the threat of disclosure of personal information, intimidate and cause self-censorship of other volunteers on the articles this journalist from Le Point has targeted, first and foremost the article on Le Point itself, but also on other articles previously called into question by Erwan Seznec (Eugénie Bastié, Sylvie Brunel, et cetera);
• They circumvent Wikipedia's editorial processes, which allow anyone to participate in developing consensus on the writing of articles and to resolve editorial disagreements, which are part of the normal functioning of the encyclopedia.

For the record, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia with horizontal, non-profit operation. It is based on five founding principles, including an encyclopedic aim, neutrality of point of view (mentioning points of view according to their place in the field of knowledge, that is to say quality sources) and respect for rules of etiquette. Decisions are taken by consensus.

Volunteer contributors, with varied profiles and political opinions, mostly edit under pseudonyms, in accordance with the platform's recommendation to avoid harassment. Contributors are not anonymous, and can be identified by the courts upon request to the host.

The encyclopedia is not perfect — for example, discussions regularly animate the community on how to improve biographies of living people and the treatment of recent events or media controversies. But its operation and its rules guarantee its independence from all powers.

We, volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, assure FredD of our support and denounce any attempt, from whatever source, to intimidate volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, including by threatening to contact their employer, and to disseminate personal information about them.

More than 1000 Wikipedians have signed this open letter, as of February 25. If you would like to sign it, you may do so from this page at the French Wikipedia.