User:Alvaro
works
[edit]- River
- Alène Lignon (Ardèche) Chère Ibie Mortagne (river) Ailette (river) Albarine Smagne Yon Lay (river) Abloux Auroue Diège Rhue (river) Céou Céor Brame Aubetin Asse (river) Othain Verzée Voueize Tardes (river) Semnon Salleron Briance Bouble Arz (river) Orbieu Barguelonnette Barguelonne Gijou Senouire Gesse Vère Guil Airain Vauvise Rupt de Mad Chée Chéran Indrois Clouère Auzoue Sorgues (river) Aujon Bléone Côle Ével Luzège Triouzoune Rère Chalaronne Vallière (river) Sevron Sâne Vive Sâne Morte Solnan Thoré Lizonne Fier (river) Colagne Chavanon Veyle Galaure Séoune Bourbre Lèze Petite Baïse Côney Chapeauroux Vaige Semme Barse Benaize Sormonne (river) Maronne Oudon (river) Lignon du Forez Blaise (Marne) Lignon du Velay Grosne (river) Madon Layon Boutonne Vègre Calavon Dadou Anglin Bouzanne Chassezac Dourdou de Camarès Arconce Meu Cérou Èvre Moder (river) Osse (river) Petite Creuse Bourbince Lunain Cosson Aveyron (Loing) Ouanne (river) Suippe Solin (river) Seugne Louge Touch (river) Ource
- Canal
- Canal du Loing ☭ Canal de Bourbourg ☭ Canal de Bergues ☭ Canal de l'Aisne à la Marne ☭ Canal des Ardennes ☭ Canal latéral à l'Aisne ☭ Canal latéral à la Marne ☭
- Related
- Aiguillon Rhue Hugues Cosnier Plateau de Lannemezan Aveyron (disambiguation) Moder
Useful :
- {{WikiProject France| importance=low | class=Start }} {{river}}
- {{iw-ref|fr|Alette|April 29, 2009|oldid=38280739}}
- Special:OldReviewedPages
- {{subst:uw-vandalism1|}} 1, 2, 3, 4
- {{subst:uw-test1|}} 1, 2, 3, 4
- WP:WARN
Alvaro
[edit]- commons:User:Alvaro/Ma galerie My gallery.
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War memorial in Dammarie-sur-Loing -
| fr | Cet utilisateur a pour langue maternelle le français. |
| en-2 | This user can contribute with an intermediate level of English. |
| de-1 | Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse. |
 | This user participates in WikiProject France. |
 | This user is a participant in WikiProject Rivers. |
stats
[edit]- 14:52, 1 April 2009 (UTC) : 162,946
- 16:33, 6 April 2009 (UTC) : 161,230
- 18:14, 7 April 2009 (UTC) : 160,436
- 15:11, 15 April 2009 (UTC) : 157,493
- 12:20, 16 April 2009 (UTC) : 158,336
- 13:28, 25 April 2009 (UTC) : 157,401
- 16:25, 1 May 2009 (UTC) : 157,979
- 12:18, 5 May 2009 (UTC) : 157,258
- 20:35, 19 May 2009 (UTC) : 160,202
- 10:25, 5 June 2009 (UTC) : 158,605
- 14:19, 13 July 2009 (UTC) : 148,258
- 17:27, 24 August 2009 (UTC) : 146,307
- 14:40, 2 September 2009 (UTC) : 147,793
- 22:37, 18 September 2009 (UTC) : 150,234
- 16:13, 20 December 2009 (UTC) : 153,356
- 15:36, 5 March 2010 (UTC) : 163,136
- 06:50, 19 April 2010 (UTC) : 153,727
- 10:06, 19 August 2010 (UTC) : 135,534
- 19:17, 13 September 2010 (UTC) : 132,532
- 09:25, 20 September 2010 (UTC) : 133,133
- 23:03, 26 October 2010 (UTC) : 135,528
- 18:49, 30 October 2012 (UTC) : 133,153
- 04:52, 26 July 2013 (UTC) : 121,689
- 14:07, 18 February 2014 (UTC) : 130,769
- 22:52, 15 August 2015 (UTC) : 118,983
Current {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} : 125,295
tools
[edit]- Pour Vienne : {{otheruses4|the French department|the French city|Vienne, Isère}}
- Pour Vienne : {{distinguish|Vienna}}
- Sur Asse : {{for|a tributary of the [[Durance]]|Asse River}}
people
[edit]Through my watchlist, I often meet Ksnow (talk · contribs), Markussep (talk · contribs), Dickeybird (talk · contribs)...
signpost
[edit]
Hanami
.jpg)
Plum flowers:
it's an ecstasy
my spring
— Kobayashi Issa via Italian Wikiquote; translation by Oltrepier for The Signpost
This time of year (with the equinox occurring just yesterday), hanami is observed in many places in the world, a time of reflection on the beauty of the world, and to some, a reminder of its transience. We hope to bring you in this issue at least some transient reflections on Wikipedia's corner of that world, and here and there some joyful takeaways.
Talking about governments editing Wikipedia
- This article gives the opinions of the author, Smallbones. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signpost, The Wikimedia Foundation, or of any other Wikipedia editor.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Larry Sanger 2006 CC-by SA 4.0, photo by Larry Sanger | |
 Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia, (3:09), Fox News |
Larry Sanger wants to have a conversation about federal government employees who edit Wikipedia. In a tweet to Elon Musk, as shown in the video, Sanger tells Musk
Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we'd like to know. Agree?"
— User:Larry Sanger
— X
After a quick "Good idea" acknowledgement from Musk, Sanger tweeted to President Trump.
Hi, @realDonaldTrump—co-founder of Wikipedia here—could I persuade you to use an executive order to make it a policy that neither federal worker hours nor federal moneys may be used to edit Wikipedia or pay for Wikipedia editing?
Thanks in advance. (I voted for you.)
— User:Larry Sanger
— X
Sanger likes to call himself the "ex-founder of Wikipedia because I want to distance myself from it" due to what he views as the encyclopedia's lack of neutrality (see video at 0:33). He has campaigned in the media, especially on Fox News, against Wikipedia and its purported bias.
He also advocates in the video that federal employees – those under the control of the U.S. executive power – should be prohibited from editing Wikipedia while on the job. I more or less agree, not for all government employees of course, but especially for those in policy making and intelligence positions.
Government workers who edit when they are not working, about topics not related to their jobs should not be targeted. What they do with their free time is essentially none of the government's business. I don't mind if the government monitors, rather than edits, Wikipedia, as long as they don't violate editors' privacy. C.I.A and F.B.I. agents might actually learn something. Maybe even something about Russian or Chinese governments attempting to edit.
But there are many less-clear cases than these simple ones. This article is my attempt to get this conversation started.
Can we agree on these cases?
[edit]The U.S. federal government does not donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Elon Musk cannot fire Wikipedians just because they contribute to Wikipedia.
It's important for our critics to remember that there is no freedom of speech in Wikipedia articles. Indeed, anybody's contributions may be edited or even removed by anybody else, subject to our rules on neutrality, no original research, verifiability, and paid editor disclosure through the use of reliable sources. It may take newbies a while to get the hang of these rules, but we invite every person on earth to edit Wikipedia as long as they follow our rules. If you don't like our rules, you are free to form your own encyclopedia project with your own rules, as Sanger has attempted several times.
A dozen years ago, I saw a summer intern from the Commerce Department ask how she could edit the article about the Commerce Department. Our rule on conflict-of-interest editing strongly discourages that type of editing, but employees can leave notes and links on an article's talk page. We also ban any editors who are paid to contribute to articles, including those paid by governments, from editing unless they declare that they are paid and who their employer and clients are.
Even though the government's fingerprints are all over some articles, in most cases Wikipedians cannot be blamed. We are just making use of information that the government has collected or processed and intentionally released to the general public.
The U.S. government has many public outreach programs meant to inform the media and general public about things like census numbers, national parks, American history, Congressional biography, weather, and geology. In fact, almost all departments and agencies have some sort of public relations office, even the Secret Service! The feds must have one of the largest PR operations in the world. But I don't think any of them offer special services to Wikipedia editors beyond what the general public receives.
The Feds also help fund many other organizations such as schools and universities, tech companies and research centers, state highway departments, and health programs and facilities. Our rules apply to these organizations as well, but most of the time the people working there are not federal government employees. Let's limit the conversation to actual federal employees, politicians, and intelligence operations.
Sanger seems to be talking about federal employees who secretly edit articles, perhaps inserting propaganda. That would be a clear violation of our rule requiring paid editor disclosure. I've never seen a disclosure saying "Hi, I'm John Smith at the C.I.A. and I'm just going to insert some of our best information into a few articles." Of course, C.I.A. agents wouldn't disclose that, would they? But I wouldn't be surprised if that type of information were to be accidentally exposed. And there have been many similar types of editing over the course of Wikipedia's history.
Just ask Congress
[edit]Way back in 2006, there was a scandal when it was discovered that computers in congressional offices were being used to secretly edit Wikipedia. This Signpost article identified editing coming from both U.S. Senate and House of Representatives offices, as well as from U.K., Canadian, and Australian Parliaments. Two months later, this Signpost article discussed how congresspeople and parliamentarians were citing Wikipedia, and the question of which (or both) parties were editing the article on then-Senator Joe Biden.
Politicians of all stripes and levels are caught editing Wikipedia fairly regularly. For example: Pennsylvania's current governor Josh Shapiro (then state attorney general) and three other high-level officials were caught in 2019 assigning Wikipedia editing duties to their office staff members, who were paid by the state.
In a 2024 case, Portland, Oregon City Councillor and mayoral candidate Rene Gonzales was caught hiring an oddly named public relations firm, Codename Enterprises, to supply suggested text for the Wiki-article about him and to train his city paid office staff to insert the text into the article.
Unfortunately for Gonzales and Codename, the contract was paid by the city, making the contract between them a public document which can be released by the city to anybody who files a freedom of information request. The contract states that for the initial services the fee was $6,400. In cases of "contentious matters" perhaps involving taking a "hostile editor" to an "administrative review noticeboard" fees would start at $3,200.
While congressional, state, and local politicians instructing their staffs to edit Wikipedia is not direct evidence of whether federal employees are paid to edit Wikipedia, it does indicate a culture of impunity in those politicians who may someday be called on to make laws and budgets that affect federal employees.
It gets spookier
[edit]Like me, Sanger seems especially concerned about intelligence services – including U.S., Russian, and Chinese – inserting propaganda into Wikipedia articles. That's the last thing most Wikipedians would accept. It's also one of the most difficult types of harmful editing to stop.
Our system of ongoing reviews and editing of any article by any editor is good at quickly catching mistakes in most individual articles. The system for catching more complex propaganda schemes, such as commercial editing firms using sockpuppets to insert advertising, is fairly good but takes a bit more time. But our ability to counter American, Russian, or Chinese intelligence agencies could likely use some help.
How could the few thousand independent active Wikipedia unpaid editors fight a coordinated attack by the same number of well-trained, well-paid state-controlled intelligence agents?
There are, however, a few indications that this type of editing exists and might sometimes even be stopped.
Perhaps the article most likely to have been written mostly by Russian propaganda efforts is the International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The article is ridiculously long and one-sided. Written by 811 editors in 3,729 edits, it is much longer than the Foreign relations of the United States article. It could accurately be condensed into one paragraph. For example:
"Following its early August 2008 invasion of the country of Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of the two breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on 26 August. Russia then encouraged other countries to recognize the regions' independence, succeeding in the long term only with Nicaragua and Venezuela. Four other countries, Syria under Bashar al-Assad, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, recognized the regions for shorter periods, but none of them currently do."
The rest of the article is just trivial misleading detail. But it has been featured on the main page five times: in "In the news" on August 27, 2008 and in "On this day..." on August 26, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021.
The article was created on the morning of August 26, 2008, by a native Russian-speaking editor who was later blocked for "persistent battleground editing, edit-warring and personal attacks". Twenty later-blocked sockpuppets also edited the article.
The editor with the most edits on the page was User:Russavia with 321 edits. He was a very active administrator on Wikimedia Commons, who specialized in promoting the Russian aviation industry, and in disrupting the English-language Wikipedia. He created dozens of sockpuppets on Wikipedia. In 2010, he boasted, on his userpage at Commons, that he had obtained permission from the official Kremlin.ru site for all photos there to be uploaded to Commons under Creative Commons licenses.
Another article that appears to have been edited by a Russian propagandist is Maria Butina. She was convicted in 2018 of being an unregistered foreign agent of Russia. Earlier that year, The Daily Beast broke the story that Butina herself was editing the article. Four other reliable sources reported similar stories. She was deported in 2019 and later became a member of the Russian Duma.
The only time I felt like I might be in direct contact with a state-sponsored propagandist was during my research on a 2021 story for The Signpost titled "Hardball in Hong Kong". A mainland Chinese editor, User:Walter Grassroot, had been accused in the Hong Kong Free Press of posting messages on an online message board threatening to turn in Hong Kong users to the security police. I'd run into Walter two years before when he very crudely responded to a Hong Kong user's article in The Signpost.
In the same 2019 issue, another mainland Chinese user, User:Techyan, had written a full article, at my request. As his editor, I thought I got to know Yan fairly well.
After the 2021 Hong Kong Free Press articles, I emailed Walter for a reaction and we exchanged half a dozen emails over the next month. Walter's English was still crude and he may have been the thug depicted in the HKFP, but at least he was straightforward.
He had forwarded my first email to Yan, who responded the same day to me using his usual email address, reinterpreting everything Walter had written. "Yan" just didn't seem to be the same person I knew from two years before. Was he an imposter? We continued this charade with each email I sent to Walter that month.
Does this mean that I was dealing with state-sponsored propagandists? I think so; Walter was the better propagandist, just by being himself.
Were they real "spies"? I think not. They obviously had some connection with the Hong Kong security police, but I doubt they had any direct connection with provincial or national level intelligence services. Walter and Yan just didn't seem professional enough.
I've never run into editors I suspected of being U.S. intelligence operatives, but back in 2007, WikiScanner identified the CIA as editing the article on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as reported by the BBC and The Signpost. Russian and Chinese governments appear to be operating on Wikipedia. Aside from legal and ethical questions, why wouldn't the U.S. government?
So far in this one-sided conversation, I've identified several types of government-Wikipedia interaction that don't seem to be a problem. But editing by politicians / policy makers and by intelligence agencies does need to be discussed and here the main problems seem to be on the government side.
I contacted Larry Sanger too late for him to submit a proper reply. He said he will consider responding, most likely on his blog.
Anybody, Wikipedian or otherwise, is invited to contribute polite comments below.
Deeper look at takedowns targeting Wikipedia
Multiple queens get DMCA'd in Romania, and other revelations from Google's removal notices
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation's list of "notices received from search engines" was updated
recently for the first time since June 2024. It contains notices received by the Wikimedia Foundation when search engines [de facto only Google] intend to indefinitely remove links to Wikipedia articles and other online Wikimedia media content from their results
. Google routinely sends these to owners of affected websites. The Foundation began publishing theirs (although not for other kinds of pages like talk pages or user pages) in 2014 "[a]s part of our commitment to transparency and our opposition to censorship". Their publication ceased in 2019 due to a glitch where [WMF's Legal department] stopped receiving the notices
, but resumed last year.
Previously, almost all of these removals appear to have been about privacy concerns, in particular right to be forgotten (RTBF) cases (see also our 2014 coverage: "European Union's 'right to be forgotten'"). In contrast, the 11 notices published so far this month are all about Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, i.e. URLs that are being removed from Google Search due to alleged copyright infringement. Nine of them affect article pages on English Wikipedia, one is about a Wikidata item and one about a Commons image. Unlike some earlier notices, the newly published notices state the affected Wikipedia URL(s) again. Each also contains a link to a copy of the full DMCA takedown notice received by Google itself, as deposited in the Lumen database, which is operated by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and was formerly known as "Chilling Effects". (These are to be distinguished from the DMCA takedown notices sent directly to the Wikimedia Foundation. According to its most recent transparency report, WMF received a total of 10 takedown notices from January to June 2024. Two of these were about English Wikipedia pages, and the Foundation rejected both.)
The English Wikipedia articles affected by the newly published notices include various articles about not very prominent topics like TV series from bygone decades or a 1960s country song – but also e.g. the article massage[1].
One rather peculiar notice claims that Queen (band), Queen's Park F.C., All the Queen's Men (TV series), MyFreeCams and (the Queen song) Back Chat all infringe upon copyrighted content from the same web page at profiles.myfreewebcam.com, per the complaint received by Google. At least Wikipedia has some good company, being only one of no fewer than 188 different domains that the complaint alleges to have pirated content from that URL. While many of those domains are clearly of an adult nature, they also include www.walmart.com, www.newegg.com, www.austinchronicle.com, www.glassdoor.com, www.bestbuy.com, www.rollingstone.com and www.nationalgeographic.com. The complaint dates from about a year ago (March 16, 2024), and Google's removal fortunately does not seem to have had a big effect on e.g. the pageviews for Queen (band) – probably because the complaint only related to the jurisdiction of Romania.
_-_Maternal_Admiration_(1869).jpg)
Another notice though is about the US jurisdiction and may have had a larger impact, targeting the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mother%27s_day for alleged infringement of a pornographic movie. Mother's Day is a popular article with obvious seasonal peaks each year, which had surpassed 300,000 daily pageviews every single year since 2015 (the earliest available data in the pageviews tool), but not in 2024 after the DMCA issue was issued [2].
Fortunately though, a US-based Google search for "Mother's Day" instead turns up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(United_States) as first result right now (while still mentioning that in response to the DMCA complaint, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page
- but somewhat cheekily linking Mother's Day in the separate knowledge panel). Last May, after the DMCA notice, that article saw its highest ever spike since 2015 [3], so it appears that at least some US-based users were simply redirected from the global to the US-focused article.
In this case, too, Wikipedia is not the only alleged pirate website: The DMCA complaint also accuses e.g. nymag.com, www.goodhousekeeping.com, www.cosmopolitan.com, www.nbcnews.com,www.marthastewart.com, www.today.com, www.oprahdaily.com, www.elle.com, www.harpersbazaar.com and the website of Country Living of infringing upon the copyright of an "original adult pornographic film".
Wikipedians interested in more timely information about such removals can also try to search the Lumen database directly. This will return a lot of false positives (e.g. a notice alleging infringement from atari.com that links to Asteroids (video game), Atari Greatest Hits etc. merely to describe the allegedly infringed work). But it does also turn up recent DMCA notices complaining about copyright violations on Wikipedia itself. For example, this one from March 18, 2025, pertaining to the US jurisdiction, alleges "Copyright premium content stolen from my client's OnlyFans page without her consent". However, editors who would like to investigate and remedy this issue directly on Wikipedia will need to request access on Lumen to see the affected Wikipedia URL, or wait until the Wikimedia Foundation has received and published the corresponding notice from Google. – H
Interview with WMF's CPTO
[edit]Selena Deckelmann, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Product and Technology Officer since 2022, recently sat down for an in-depth interview (71 minutes) on the 176th episode of "Between the Brackets", the MediaWiki-themed podcast of longtime MediaWiki developer Yaron Koren.
After discussing some personal background (including her previous position at the Mozilla Foundation), the interview turned to her role at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she is currently overseeing roughly 300 of the over 700 Wikimedia Foundation employees. Deckelmann took pains to stress that there are also tens of thousands of volunteer developers
contributing to keeping the site running – if one counts not only people contributing code to MediaWiki itself, but also those who e.g. work on on-wiki tools like user scripts or modules, or are using the Foundation's cloud services. Asked by the interviewer about the exact nature of the CPTO's decisionmaking power, Deckelmann first stressed that she does not control the outcome of the technical RfCs guiding the development of the MediaWiki software (e.g. about the adoption of the vue.js framework) . When probed further whether there was still a "king of England" type authority with "power to step in" on rare occasions, she added that
there's definitely areas where I have to take into account, like, the safety and security of staff or the safety and security of editors. And actually, normally I don't even have to weigh in on that type of thing. That's more of a trust and safety and legal concern, right? But maybe there's a software intersection there. Those are the types of things where, you know, I wouldn't say it's a king of England power, but it's more like a very accountable uperson who is serving this community and sometimes there are things that I am accountable for that no one else can be accountable for. And yeah, there I have to make decisions. But when it comes to the normal kinds of conversations that we have about, like, whether Vector 2022 is good enough, I can express my opinion and I can try to help people understand why I might want to do something and why I really encourage them, like this is the way that this probably should go for like best use of resources, effective use of everyone's time – for sure, I share that. But [...], it's not a situation where I control what people say or what they do with RFCs at all.
Deckelmann also shared that she was working on getting root access, still having some tasks to complete in the process that every developer has to go through for this.
Another question was about how WMF prioritizes work on the different Wikimedia projects, with the interviewer sharing the impression that "Wikipedia gets the focus over projects like Wikinews and so forth", and mentioning recent discussions where "certain people at Wikimedia Commons [argued] that that site is getting neglected". He highlighted a June 2024 comment Deckelmann made in these discusions:
WMF has an obligation to invest resources in a way that furthers not just knowledge collection, but knowledge dissemination. To what extent is the Wikimedia Commons community invested in the dissemination of knowledge via images on Wikipedia articles? To date, my observation is that the primary focus of the Commons community is the collecting of free content, rather than its dissemination. If that’s the case, we should talk about these differences more openly together to plan a way forward.
In response, Deckelmann added that the Commons world, like the universe that all those contributors operate in, is not so different from the rest of the Wikimedia projects
, and that the communities are not super distinct
after all, with a lot of overlap. Hence,
what I think is a missed opportunity is to think about with the reach that one gets from a project like Wikipedia. How much more powerful and effective would it be if we were really thinking hard about the ways in which we could showcase all of the incredible images. There's not as many videos honestly, but a lot of images, really incredible ones, that are in Commons and difficult to find. [...I am] just trying to encourage people to think about the ways that we could be approaching solving some of the problems that we face differently. And by differently, I mean, rather than thinking of each community as this distinct thing that has to be addressed distinctly and has to be dealt with separately and there's like a whole like set of engineers assigned only to work on Commons. Maybe actually there are some problems to solve between these projects. Same thing with Wikidata, you know. I think there's a lot that could be done if we were to think about this system holistically and the ways in which they, the different projects complement or don't complement each other.
Koren followed up by pointing out that four of the Wikimedia sites are actually more like repositories than places people go to directly (well, three plus one that doesn't exist yet), which is Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikifunctions, and then Abstract Wikipedia. [...] and interestingly, three of those four were created by Denny Vrandečić. [...] It is still not clear to me what Wikifunctions is all about [despite having already conducted at least two lengthy interviews about it].
In response, Deckelmann mentioned some of the planned use cases of Wikifunctions, including generating multilingual text for Abstract Wikipedia from a central language-neutral source. Later, Koren somewhat provocatively pointed out the apparent "irony" that at same time the Wikimedia Foundation is making this concerted effort to populate Wikipedia and make sure it stays up [in face of generative AI and other challenges], there is a project to replace Wikipedia, which is Abstract Wikipedia
. Deckelmann called this a dystopian
view, arguing that while sure, you can paint a future vision [where it] just replaces everybody's [Wikipedia editing] work
, that is absolutely not the aim – Denny has been in this world for a very long time
. Also, she stressed the long timelines of the project, calling it very ambitious
and a small part
of the Foundation's work. She related it to the three horizons model by the consulting company McKinsey, which posits that organizations should split their investments between current needs, preparing for the medium term, and lastly a certain percentage for the far future (typically 70%/25%/5%):
However, it would remain up to individual Wikipedia communities whether to make use of such features. Also,The work that they are doing on Wikifunctions right now is very interesting to me [from] a technical and social point of view, but pretty far from replacing the way that content is created [currently], it's in that 5% category. [...] in the next 3 to 5 years it would be amazing if it helped with translation in some significant way [...]. There is a couple of beautiful demos [...] like templatizing kilometers to miles [with] automatic conversion [... with a] cool user interface.
There is so many challenges with this type of technology [used by Abstract Wikipedia] – it's slow. Lastly, she hinted that the entire project could be rendered largely obsolete by generative AI:
– HDenny will freely admit [...that] this idea he had before these major advances in generative AI have occurred. So there is a possibility that some of the problems that Denny was trying to solve might be better solved with a generative model. And he is like open to that, honestly, he is thinking about that pretty deeply. But there is still lots of interesting applications of the tools they built.
Brief notes
[edit]- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Giraffer (1 March) and its newest Bureaucrat, Barkeep49 (7 March). Both requests closed with 98% support or higher.
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Cove (beginning 17 March 2025), followed by Ipomoea (beginning 24 March 2025). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
The good, the bad, and the unusual
Reluctant resisters
[edit]In a piece titled "Wikipedia's Reluctant Resisters", Feven Merid of the Columbia Journalism Review reported on how New York-based Wikipedians are holding up under the recent onslaught of attacks from several right-wing sources against the encyclopedia and its contributors. The attacking sources mentioned include the Heritage Foundation, the New York Post, and Elon Musk – see previous Signpost coverage here and here. The CJR specifically reached out to some members of the Wikimedia NYC chapter, including executive director Pacita Rudder, as well as Wikipedians Molly Stark, Jim Henderson, and Ryan Ng. Despite expressing concern over the security of Wikipedia and its volunteers, all of them are generally calm while discussing the recent attacks, if not nonchalant, with Rudder notably saying:
When you choose to become an editor, it's because you're passionate about an issue or you're passionate about making sure that knowledge exists and it's free for people to use. You don’t get paid to do this, and you didn’t sign up to be attacked
The New Yorker talks to Heritage Foundation
[edit]The New Yorker reports that Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia. It reviews Musk's insults and interactions involving Wikipedia, "Defund Wikipedia...", his reaction to the article about his "stiff armed salute", "Wokipedia", and "Dickypedia."
The Heritage Foundation does acknowledge their plan to investigate Wikipedia contributors to The New Yorker. "Mike Howell, of Heritage, told me that this 'investigation' of Wikipedia, which, he said, 'is where information is laundered,' will be 'shared with the appropriate policymakers to help inform a strategic response.' " The appropriate policymakers are likely to be in Congress.
According to Howell's biography from the Heritage Foundation –
Mike is the Executive Director of the Heritage Oversight Project. Launched in January 2022, the Oversight Project is Heritage’s investigative and oversight arm. The Oversight Project utilizes Heritage’s world-class issue area experts to inform strategic records requests, targeted litigation, and innovative investigations utilizing cutting-edge resources and contacts. The work is primarily intended to drive successful federal, state, and local oversight and accountability of the destructive work of the radical, progressive Left. Successful oversight means shaping successful policy victories.
Mike joined The Heritage Foundation in October 2018 from the Department of Homeland Security, Office of the General Counsel, where he was the Chief Legal Point of Contact for the department’s 3,000-lawyer office for all congressional oversight and investigations ...
... At Heritage, Mike previously served as the liaison to the Trump Administration and later as a Senior Advisor for Government Relations in the 117th Congress.
– S
Larry, Elon, and Don; or, will Wikipedia get its very own Executive Order?
[edit]
"Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia" – on a Fox News video which also shows Larry Sanger's request for Donald Trump to issue an executive order banning government employees from paid editing of Wikipedia. See this issue's Opinion piece for further coverage. – S
Anti-Defamation League report
[edit]"More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Anti-Defamation League claimed in a bombshell report released Tuesday" according to the New York Post.
The story was covered by many others besides the NY Post, including CNN, MSNBC's Morning Joe, the Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Insider, and the original report from ADL
A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told the NY Post, "The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate ... Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League's data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis.” The spokesperson added that it was "unfortunate" that the ADL did not contact them before the report was released. – B, S
Progress in Indian courts
[edit]The News Minute reports on an Indian Supreme Court hearing on SC slams Delhi HC order directing Wikipedia to remove ANI defamation case page. The case of immediate concern was about the Wikipedia article Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation, not about the alleged defamation itself on the Asian News International page. United News of India added that "the Supreme Court appeared unconvinced by [the High Court]'s reasoning [for the takedown order] and questioned why the High Court was being 'so touchy' about the issue."
Supreme Court Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan noted that the case would have broad implications for press freedom. "This concerns press freedom. If it is Wikipedia today, it could be someone else tomorrow." Reports from Scroll.in – read here – and Reuters – via local press outlets – confirm their expression of concern, albeit in a difficult to parse form in the Hindustan Times. Reuters owns 26 percent of ANI but is not involved in ANI's operations. The next hearing on the case is scheduled for April 4. – S
In brief
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- Improving the world one headshot at a time: Jules Roscoe of 404 Media has found out first about the bad celebrity photos currently populating Wikipedia – see some examples on the Bad Wikipedia Photos profile on Instagram – and the program that is actively trying to replace them with more quality pics: WikiPortraits, conducted by Commons volunteers and supported by micro-grants from the Wikimedia Foundation. WikiPortraits co-founder Kevin Payravi is quoted extensively on the story, and there's even a mention of how a volunteer helped Jeremy Strong replace his own bad pic. The 404 Media article has later been cited by PC Magazine and Engadget. – S, O
- Bloomberg sources anon Wikipedians about Palestine–Israel edit warring: "Wikipedia roiled with internal strife over page edits about the Middle East" (March 7, via Detroit News); original, paywalled. The New York Post got in the fray with commentary on Bloomberg's commentary . – B
- Rolled food recipe: Comic XKCD continues its fascination with Wikipedia. XKCD's Omniroll examines "List of rolled foods" and imagines combining them all. As often happens, the media attention inspires talk page discussion which anyone can join. Bring your favorite cookbooks to cite. – BR
- Performance issues: "China's online commenters seize on drop in F-22 engine performance data" – from the South China Morning Post. If you love discussions of thrust-to-weight ratios (both with and without afterburner) check out the Pratt & Whitney F119's Wikipedia page. – B
- Gender gap: "Wikipedia has a huge gender equality problem – here's why it matters" in The Conversation documents the gaps in women editors and women's biographies, and three theories for the gaps. – B
- Women's History Month: Thirty people attended the Montana State University edit-a-thon at the library and a dozen more joined online to celebrate Women's History Month. They edited articles about Montana women like Alma Knows His Gun McCormick, an Apsáalooke (Crow) Native American researcher who is nationally recognized for her work on women's health. Editor Mary Mark Ockerbloom told The Signpost, "When diversity and science are under attack, editing for equality has an even more important role." – S
- That May 8 holiday: The Guardian (Nigeria) celebrated International Women's Day with three short biographies for contributors User:Aimeabibis from Benin, User:Cmwaura from Kenya, and User:Olugold from Nigeria. – B
- Wikipedians are 'on a mission to fireproof history' in Los Angeles: An edit-a-thon in the Los Angeles Hammer Museum helped document the lost buildings and landmarks destroyed during the recent fires including Cholada Thai and the Malibu Feed Bin. – S
- Yes, we are (see next brief): New Zealand's Detail reports that Wikipedia (is) a surprising repository of fact. – S
- The strangest rabbit hole: This Hollywood Reporter story suggests a connection (to this reporter) among the following: John Oliver, The Rolling Stone, the Trump layoffs, domestic violence, gun rights, Mel Gibson (and his father), Wikipedia, sedevacantism, Art Fleming and Jeopardy! Say it ain't so, John! – S
Explaining the disappointing history of Flagged Revisions; and what's the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far?
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Flagged Revisions: Explaining a disappointing history
[edit]- Reviewed by Clayoquot
A 2024 paper[1] explores the history of Flagged Revisions in several Wikipedia language versions. Flagged Revisions is a vandalism-mitigation feature that was first deployed in the German Wikipedia in 2008. There were calls for the feature to be used broadly across WMF wikis but community and WMF support both dwindled over the years.
The English Wikipedia uses the term Pending Changes for its variant of the feature. After extensive discussions between 2009 and 2017, the English Wikipedia community settled on a very small role for Pending Changes – it is used in just ~0.06% of articles. In the German Wikipedia, whose community requested the initial development of the system, it is used in nearly all articles.
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The authors start with a premise that Flagged Revisions is fundamentally a good idea, citing their own prior research finding that "the system substantially reduced the amount of vandalism visible on the site with little evidence of negative trade-offs" (see our earlier review: "FlaggedRevs study finds that concerns about limiting Wikipedia's 'anyone can edit' principle 'may be overstated'"). They then ask,
"What led to the decline in FlaggedRevs' popularity over the years, despite its effectiveness?"
The paper attributes the loss of popularity to community challenges ("conflicts with existing social norms and values", "unclear moderation instructions"); platform and policy challenges ("lack of technical support from the governing body", "bureaucratic hurdles", "lack of cross-community empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the system"); and technical challenges.
As part of their methodology, the authors analyzed dozens of on-wiki discussions in the English, German, Indonesian, and Hungarian Wikipedias. They also conducted interviews with seven individuals, six of whom were WMF employees. It is unclear how much weight on-wiki discussions were given in the findings.
A major drawback of Pending Changes, according to the English Wikipedia's past RfCs, is that it significantly increases work for experienced editors and leads to backlogs. The paper discusses this issue under Technical challenges in a way that suggests it is solvable; it does not suggest how to solve it. Another part of the paper asserts that "the English Wikipedia community" hired at least one contractor to do technical work, implying that the authors mistakenly believe the community can hire people.
Where the paper breaks important ground is in exploring the dynamics between the Wikipedia communities and the WMF. It goes into depth about the sometimes-slow pace of technology development and the limitations of the Community Wishlist Survey process.
Applications are open for the 2025 Wikimedia Research Fund
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation announced the call for proposals for its 2025 research fund, open until April 16, 2025.
Changes from previous years include:
For the first time, we are going to accept multi-year extended research proposals (currently for two years with a possibility of applying for renewal for a third year).
– instead of the previous limitations to 12 months.- More focus on established researchers
We have reduced the proposal review stages from two to one for this year.
The list of proposals funded in the 2022–23 round might give an impression of the kind of research work previously produced with support from the fund (while the 2023–24 round is still in progress), and might also shed some light on possible reasons for these changes – e.g. it appears that several projects struggled to complete work within 12 months:
(See also our 2022 coverage: "Wikimedia Research Fund invites proposals for grants up to $50k, announces results of previous year's round")
So again, what has the impact of ChatGPT really been?
[edit]- By Tilman Bayer
More than two years after the release of ChatGPT precipitated what English Wikipedia calls the AI boom, its possible effects on Wikipedia continue to preoccupy researchers. Recently, ChatGPT surpassed Wikipedia in Similarweb's "Most Visited Websites In The World" list. While the information value of such rankings might be limited and the death of Wikipedia from AI clearly still isn't imminent, generative AI seems here to stay.
Previous efforts
[edit]Earlier attempts to investigate ChatGPT's impact on Wikipedia include a rather simplistic analysis by the Wikimedia Foundation, which concluded in February 2024 that there had been No major drop in readers during the meteoric rise in ChatGPT use
, based on a juxtaposition of monthly pageview numbers for 2022 and 2023.
A May 2024 preprint by authors from King's College London (still not published in peer-reviewed form) reported more nuanced findings, see our review: "Actually, Wikipedia was not killed by ChatGPT – but it might be growing a little less because of it".
And a June 2024 abstract-only conference paper presented stronger conclusions, see our coverage: "'Impact of Generative AI': A 'significant decrease in Wikipedia page views' after the release of ChatGPT. However, these likewise don't seem to have been published as a full paper yet.
More recently, several new quantitative research publications have examined such issues further from various angles (in addition to some qualitative research papers that we will cover in future issues):
"Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT"
[edit]This paper,[2] to be presented at the upcoming WWW conference, focuses on ChatGPT's impact on the English Wikipedia. From the abstract:
How has Wikipedia activity changed for articles with content similar to ChatGPT following its introduction? [...] Our analysis reveals that newly created, popular articles whose content overlaps with ChatGPT 3.5 saw a greater decline in editing and viewership after the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT than dissimilar articles did. These findings indicate heterogeneous substitution effects, where users selectively engage less with existing platforms when AI provides comparable content.
The aforementioned King's College preprint had used what this reviewer called a fairly crude statistical method
. The authors of the present paper directly criticize it as unsuitable for the question at hand:
Several factors about Wikipedia necessitate our differences-in-differences (DiD) strategy, in contrast to the interrupted time series analysis that is often used in similar work [...including the King's College preprint on Wikipedia]. In addition to having a broader scope of topics, Wikipedia allows for more diverse user incentives than analogous platforms: viewers exhibit both shallow and deep information needs, while contributors are driven by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. These factors may dampen the effects of ChatGPT on some users and articles. In fact, [the King's College researchers] analyze Wikipedia engagement in the aggregate, and do not identify significant drops in activity following the launch of ChatGPT. We hypothesize that their analysis do not fully capture the heterogeneity of Wikipedia, compared to similar platforms with more homogeneous contents and users.
To account for this (hypothesized) uneven impact of ChatGPT on the articles in their sample, the authors split it into those that are "similar" and "dissimilar" to ChatGPT's output. Concretely, they first prompted GPT 3.5 Turbo to [...] write an encyclopedic article for [each Wikipedia article's topic], similar to those found on Wikipedia [...]
. (GPT 3.5 Turbo, by now a rather dated LLM, corresponds to the free version of ChatGPT available to most users in 2023.) Embeddings of this output and the original Wikipedia article were then derived using a different model by OpenAI. The "similar" vs. "dissimilar" split of the sample was based on the cosine similarity between these two embeddings. The authors interpret this metric, somewhat speculatively, as a proxy for substitutability of the two options from the user’s point of view, and for GPT 3.5’s mastery of the topic
. They thus assume that for the "dissimilar" half, there is less possibility that ChatGPT will replace Wikipedia as the main provider of information for these articles
.
The sample consisted of all articles that had been among the English Wikipedia's 1000 most viewed for any month during the analyzed timespan (July 2015 to November 2023).
The rest of the paper proceeds to compare the monthly time series of views and edits from before and after the release of ChatGPT (i.e. the months until November 2022 vs. the months from December 2022 on).[supp 1]
To do this, the authors use the aforementioned standard diff-in-diff regression, while also controlling for article length and the trend in overall growth of all articles
. As a kind of robustness check, this regression is calculated for varying values of article "recency" T, by including only observations for articles which are at most T months old.
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Overall, the researchers interpret their results as implying
that Wikipedia articles where ChatGPT provides a similar output experience a larger drop in views after the launch of ChatGPT. This effect is much less pronounced for edit behavior.
Somewhat intriguingly, this finding might suggest a disparate impact on different parts of the Wikimedia movement: To simplify a bit, pageviews correspond fairly directly, via Wikipedia's well-known donation banners, to the Wikimedia Foundation's most important source of revenue by far. Edit numbers, on the other hand, are a proxy for the amount of work volunteers put into maintaining and improving Wikipedia. So, very speculatively, one might interpret the paper's results as indicating that ChatGPT endangers the Foundation's financial health more than the editing community's sustainability.
All that said though, it must be kept in mind that generative AI has vastly improved since the timespan analyzed in the paper. Last month, a prominent OpenAI employee even proclaimed that the company's newly released ChatGPT Deep Research tool might be the beginning of the end for Wikipedia
(in a since deleted tweet that was followed by some more nuanced statements).
Of note, one of the paper's six authors is Daron Acemoglu, one of the winners of last year's Nobel Prize in Economics, and one of the most cited economists. (However, his work – including on the impact of AI on the labor market – has not always escaped criticism from other economists. Still, one scholar expressed his excitement that the present paper marks Probably the first time Daron Acemoglu published in WWW!
)
The rise of "additionally" and "crucial": "Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks"
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Published earlier this month, this preprint[3] presents what the authors call
"[...] a thorough analysis of the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, examining the evolution of Wikipedia through existing data and using simulations to explore potential risks. [...] Our findings and simulation results reveal that [English] Wikipedia articles have been influenced by LLMs, with an impact of approximately 1%-2% in certain categories."
As the researchers (from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and International School for Advanced Studies) note, the question of how much content on Wikipedia may be LLM-generated has been explored before:
The detection of AI-generated content has been a hot research topic in recent years [...], including its application to Wikipedia articles (Brooks et al., 2024). But MGT [Machine-Generated Content] detectors have notable limitations [...], and as a result, researchers are also exploring other methods for estimating the LLM impact, such as word frequency analysis [...].
See also our earlier review of that Brooks et al. paper (presented at the "NLP for Wikipedia Workshop" at EMNLP 2024) for more about its various limitations: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper."
For example, the authors observe an increasing frequency of the words “crucial” and “additionally”, which are favored by ChatGPT [according to previous research]
in the content of Wikipedia article. To be sure, the mere presence of such words is of course affected by even more false positive and false negatives that the LLM detectors used in that previous research (such as GPTZero). However, the authors partially compensate for this by tracking the frequency increase over several years and several content areas.
Separate from relying on those words found to be "favored by ChatGPT" in previous research, they also use "LLM simulations" to estimate word frequency changes that would indicat LLM usage in Wikipedia:
We use GPT-4o-mini to revise the January 1, 2022, versions of Featured Articles to construct word frequency data reflecting the impact of large language models (LLMs). This choice is based on the assumption that Featured Articles are less likely to be affected by LLMs, given their rigorous review processes and ongoing manual maintenance.
An amusing sidenote here is that the researchers ran into a technical problem with this process because AI companies' content safety standards are apparently stricter than those of Wikipedia: some responses are filtered due to the prompt triggering Azure OpenAI’s content moderation policy, likely because certain Wikipedia pages contain violent content.
Overall, these methods do lend some support to the above quoted impact of approximately 1%-2% in certain categories
result (although it is not quite clear to this reviewer how representative e.g. the conspicuous results for "crucial" and "additionally" are among the much larger sets of words identified as "favored by ChatGPT" in the previous research cited by the paper). But the authors also caution that
- While [the content of] some Wikipedia articles have been influenced by LLMs, the overall impact has so far been quite limited.
The paper offers also a cursory observation about pageviews, but (unlike the WWW paper) does not make a serious attempt at establishing causality:
There has been a slight decline in page views for certain scientific categories on Wikipedia, but the connection to LLMs remains uncertain.
Large parts of the article are concerned with the potential indirect impact on AI research itself:
Our findings that LLMs are impacting Wikipedia and the impact could extend indirectly to some NLP tasks through their dependence on Wikipedia content. For instance, the target language for machine translation may gradually shift towards the language style of LLMs, albeit in small steps.
This is not too dissimilar from the widely publicized (but sometimes overhyped) concerns about a posssible "model collapse" for LLMs, but the impact remains speculative.
Interestingly, this paper is one of the few research publications that apart from Wikipedia also uses content from Wikinews, albeit only in an auxiliary fashion (for the purpose of generating questions to test LLMs in specific scenarios).
"Death by AI: Will large language models diminish Wikipedia?"
[edit]This "brief communication" in JASIST[4] examines a very similar question (likewise only for English Wikipedia), arriving at some similar overall conclusions as the WWW paper reviewed above:
- Regarding editor numbers, the authors argue that their model
suggests that Wikipedians are not yet materially affected by AI-related changes in the platform.
- Concerning pageviews, they claim that
Reviewing the Wikipedia readership from recent years, disintermediation [of Wikipedia] by answer bots appears already prevalent and only to increase over time.
However, compared to the WWW paper reviewed above, the statistical methods underlying this assertion about pageviews are rather cavalier - they basically rely on eyeballing charts:
Human readership peaked around 2016, at 106 billion page views, and has since dropped to around 90 billion views per year. Meanwhile, the number of automated (non-human) page views has doubled since 2017, from 14 billion to over 28 billion. Human page views are thus likely to continue their decline in favor of AI bot accesses. With that, Wikipedia's visibility will also diminish.
This kind of reasoning obviously ignores any other possible causes for the (slight) decline in human pageviews over the past decade (e.g. improved detection of automated pageviews, or, hypothetically, a decrease in the global number of English speakers with Internet access). The diff-in-diff and interrupted time series methods used by the aforementioned papers are designed to avoid such fallacies.
Also, while the Wikimedia Foundation has indeed reported a rise in scraping activity last year largely fueled by scraping bots collecting training data for AI-powered workflows and products
(albeit perhaps more in form of API requests than pageviews), it seems a bit adventurous to attribute all non-human pageviews to "AI bots", considering that there are many other reasons for scraping websites.[supp 2]
To be fair, the rest of the paper does offer a more thorough analysis. The authors construct a feedback model to postulate causal relationships between several different variables, and then check those hypotheses empirically. More concretely, they start with a "basic" flywheel-type model assuming that
The dynamics on Wikipedia start with contributors creating and editing articles, which attract readers to consume the content. As readership grows, readers are more likely to spot a need for edits (e.g., content correction), thereby becoming contributors themselves.
Introducing AI is hypothesized to disrupt this idyllic symbiosis between human editors and readers:
As AI answer bots automate readership and AI writer bots automate contributions, the original dynamics are expanded accordingly. While the reinforcement relationships between contributorship and readership remain, AI answer and writer bots exert negative impacts on human activity due to their crowding-out effects.
The activity of these different parties is then operationalized as pageview and edit numbers drawn from stats.wikimedia.org, relying on the existing classifications of users as bots (for edits) and of pageviews as human or non-human. As mentioned above, it seems quite a stretch to assume that the latter all come from "AI answer bots". Similarly, many a Wikipedian might rise an eyebrow at seeing edit bots (which have existed on Wikipedia since 2001[supp 3]) as "AI writer bots".[supp 4]
And it becomes especially contrived when the authors try to shoehorn existing research literature into justifying their model's assumption that bot editing activity negatively affects human editing activity:
Writer bots are necessary to help human editors maintain an ever-growing body of knowledge and update routine content (Petroni et al., 2022), yet writer bots also negatively affect Wikipedia in that they become competitors or opponents, by creating false knowledge or by deleting legitimate user contributions. Thomas (2023) argues that especially LLMs with their ability to make “creative” (i.e., false but plausible) contributions pose a danger to Wikipedia, requiring human editors to correct such contributions. Elsewhere deletionist writer bots (Livingstone, 2016)[[supp 3]] became a source of frustration particularly for novice Wikipedians who considered their contributions invalidated and thus turned away from further contributorship.
For example, the abstract of the cited Thomas (2023) paper[5], published less than six months after the release of ChatGPT, explicitly positions it as an evaluation of the the potential benefits and challenges of using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to edit Wikipedia
(emphasis added)- i.e. not a suitable reference for the factual claim that writer bots also negatively affect Wikipedia in that they become competitors or opponents
. And the authors reference for deletionist writer bots
(Livingstone, 2016)[supp 3] basically describes the exact opposite: A (human) bot operator's frustrations with his bots contributions getting deleted by deletionist human editors. The paper contains various further examples of such hallucinated citations.
The model is extended by some other variables, e.g. one modelling the recognition of Wikipedia as a public good
, for which
we expect Wikipedia recognition to be a driver of contributorship [...]. To assess Wikipedia recognition, we use Google Trends as a proxy, as it monitors the popularity of Wikipedia as a search term.
Based on the last 15–20 years of data, the researcher find statistical support for most of their postulated relationships between these variables, in the form of impressively large adjusted and impressively small p-values.[supp 5] Still, the authors also caution that Due to the limited data, the proposed feed-back model has yet to be fully tested empirically.
They summarize their overall results as follows:
Starting from the premise of a producer–consumer relationship where readers access knowledge provided by other contributors, and then also create knowledge in return, we postulate a positive feedback cycle where readers attract contributors and vice versa. Using this logic and recognizing the advances in AI-enabled automation, we note that this positive feedback relationship has attracted AI bots both as “readers” (answer bots) and as “contributors” (writer bots), thereby weakening traditional human engagement in both readership and contributorship, thus shifting the originally virtuous cycle towards a vicious cycle that would diminish Wikipedia.
Briefly
[edit]- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
References
[edit]- ^ Tran, Chau; Take, Kejsi; Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Greenstadt, Rachel (2024-11-08). "Challenges in Restructuring Community-based Moderation". Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8 (CSCW2): 415–1–415:24. doi:10.1145/3686954. Retrieved 2025-03-16. {closed access}} / Open access preprint: Tran, Chau; Take, Kejsi; Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Greenstadt, Rachel (2024-02-27), Challenges in Restructuring Community-based Moderation, arXiv:2402.17880
- ^ Lyu, Liang; Siderius, James; Li, Hannah; Acemoglu, Daron; Huttenlocher, Daniel; Ozdaglar, Asuman (2025-03-02), Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT, arXiv:2503.00757
- ^ Huang, Siming; Xu, Yuliang; Geng, Mingmeng; Wan, Yao; Chen, Dongping (2025-03-04), Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks, arXiv:2503.02879 Data and code
- ^ Wagner, Christian; Jiang, Ling (2025-01-03). "Death by AI: Will large language models diminish Wikipedia?". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. n/a (n/a). doi:10.1002/asi.24975. ISSN 2330-1643.
- ^ Thomas, Paul A. (2023-05-09). "Wikipedia and large language models: perfect pairing or perfect storm?". Library Hi Tech News. 40 (10): 6–8. doi:10.1108/LHTN-03-2023-0056. hdl:1808/34102. ISSN 0741-9058.
- Supplementary references and notes:
- ^ Unfortunately the authors do not specify whether they excluded bot edits and non-human pageviews.
- ^ What's more, the cited numbers don't even match the stated source, i.e. the Wikimedia Foundation's stats.wikimedia.org site (which e.g. gives 17.3 billion non-human views for 2017, not
14 billion
). Unfortunately the paper comes without replication data or code. - ^ a b c Livingstone, Randall M. (2016-01-09). "Population automation: An interview with Wikipedia bot pioneer Ram-Man". First Monday. 21 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v21i1.6027. ISSN 1396-0466.
- ^ The authors' problematic assumption that bot accounts on Wikipedia are powered by AI is especially evident in the "Discussion" section, which claims that a
very recent growth in edits [...] may already be a result of generative AI support
, pointing to a table that lists half-yearly edit numbers and ends with a much higher number in bot edits during the first half of 2024. However, that spike has largely subsided in more recent data. - ^ However, statisticians with high blood pressure are advised to avoid looking at Table 1, which reports several of these p-values as negative (
<0.000
), a mathematical impossibility. While these might just be typos arising from cutting off trailing digits, they don't quite raise confidence in JASIST's peer review processes.
All the world's a stage, we are merely players...
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Shuipzv3, Vestrian24Bio, (February 23 to March 15) GN22, CAWylie, (February 23 to March 1 and March 9 to 15), -insert valid name here- (February 23 to March 1) and Rahcmander (March 9 to 15).
Never free, never me, so I dub thee Unforgiven (February 23 to March 1)
[edit]| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michelle Trachtenberg |  |
6,388,444 |  |
A former child actress better known for her roles in popular TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl, Michelle Trachtenberg died at the age of 39, possibly of complications that emerged from a liver transplant (her family denied an autopsy on religious grounds). In the 97th Academy Awards right after the week covered here, Trachtenberg was not in the in memoriam segment, raising complaints from her fans, but she was on the extended obituary in the Oscars' website and possibly got excluded for being less prominent in movies compared to TV (her most popular film role is EuroTrip!). |
| 2 | Gene Hackman |  |
5,430,970 |  |
A very acclaimed actor who died at 95, with a career of five decades mostly spent playing gruff people (including the roles that gave him two Academy Awards, Best Actor as a rough cop and Best Supporting Actor as a morally questionable sheriff) in movies such as Bonnie and Clyde, Superman, Mississippi Burning, Enemy of the State, and Runaway Jury, before being forced to retire in 2004 for health reasons (meaning that sadly his last movie is Welcome to Mooseport), only reappearing for a few narration gigs while dedicating himself to writing. Hackman's death had an element of surprise in that his wife and dog were also found dead at his home, with no indication of foul play or carbon monoxide poisoning. |
| 3 | Pope Francis | |
1,355,265 | .jpg) |
While the awards circuit recognizes Conclave, the possibility of a real-world pope election for the first time in 12 years is being raised, as the pontiff remains in a serious condition due to respiratory problems. |
| 4 | Chhaava |  |
1,348,629 |  |
The latest Bollywood box-office hit chronicles the adventures of #10 as he battles Mughal forces. |
| 5 | 2025 German federal election | |
1,317,670 |  |
The centre-right/conservative CDU/CSU won the most seats, with its leader, Friedrich Merz, projected to be Germany's next chancellor. The far-right Alternative for Germany, which received support from #6, doubled its vote share to place its best results ever, becoming the biggest party in all five former East German states. The SPD, the leading party of the ruling coalition, posted its worst results for more than 130 years. Its junior partner, the Greens, also lost seats, while former coalition partner the FDP lost all its seats and failed to reach the 5% threshold for representation in the Bundestag. The Left Party significantly improved its voting share and gained seats. The parties will now hold negotiations to form a governing coalition, though all relevant parties have continued to rule out involvement with the AfD. |
| 6 | Elon Musk |  |
1,242,921 | _(cropped).jpg) |
As Musk calls for the US withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO, Tesla Takedown protests broke out in several Tesla dealerships across the US, and an arson attack on a dealership in France destroyed about a dozen cars. It was also reported that Tesla sales have fallen significantly in several countries in Europe as well as Australia. On March 6, Starship flight test 8, the eighth flight test of the SpaceX Starship, was destroyed about 8 minutes after launch, with the vehicle breaking up in the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean. |
| 7 | Zero Day (American TV series) | |
1,101,430 |  |
This American political thriller miniseries following the chronicles of a former US president, played by Robert De Niro (pictured), put in charge of investigating a zero-day cyberattack with major damage across the country was released on February 20 on Netflix. Reviews were mixed, with a rating of 53% on Rotten Tomatoes by both critics and users. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2025 |  |
1,074,700 | .jpg) |
As our #2 once said, "Getting old is like being a car. Eventually, the parts start to wear out, and you're just hoping the engine holds up." |
| 9 | The White Lotus season 3 | |
877,544 |  |
The third season of this HBO show was ordered in 2022 and premiered last week and will continue to release a new episode on Sundays for the next seven weeks. This installment features an ensemble cast, led by Leslie Bibb (pictured), and follows the lives of the staff and guests at a posh wellness resort in Thailand. Early critical reviews have been favorable. |
| 10 | Sambhaji | |
874,937 |  |
The son of the famed ruler Shivaji, this guy was a real-life warrior who was killed by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb's men. |
It fuels the heart and sex is not the enemy (March 2 to 8)
[edit]| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anora | |
4,026,527 | .jpg) |
The biggest winner of the 97th Academy Awards was a modest production made for only $6 million with a crew of 40, following a stripper's love story with the son of a Russian oligarch, although halfway through it becomes a search for the guy as he runs away once daddy's henchmen arrive. Critical acclaim and heavy promotion by distributor Neon ensured 5 Oscars, 4 to director Sean Baker (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Editing) and Best Actress to leading lady Mikey Madison, who has already been a Manson family member in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and a Ghostface in the fifth Scream. Some people were not very acceptive of Anora's glory, such as puritans objecting about telling the story of a sex worker — and ignorantly saying the film is soft porn simply for having sex scenes — and fans of both Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres dismissing Madison's win. |
| 2 | Mikey Madison | |
2,923,905 | ||
| 3 | Adrien Brody | |
2,270,748 |  |
22 years after winning Best Actor for The Pianist, Adrien Brody again got an Oscar playing an Eastern European survivor of the Holocaust in #7. While his acting was good, no one liked how he called off the "get off the stage" music and proceeded to make a 5-minute speech of mostly rambling. |
| 4 | 97th Academy Awards | |
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AMPAS awarded what they perceived to be the best movies of 2024, with Conan O'Brien hosting the ceremony. Along with all the entries here there were Oscars for the script of Conclave, the effects and sound of Dune: Part Two, the sets and costumes of Wicked, the make-up effects of The Substance, Latvian cartoon Flow upsetting The Wild Robot for best animated feature, and Best International Film providing the first Brazilian win with I'm Still Here (though sadly the country focused less on celebrating its victory than spewing gratuitous hate upon Anora, including making spiteful and unfair comparisons of #2 to Gwyneth Paltrow). |
| 5 | Gene Hackman | |
1,734,494 |  |
The in memoriam segment of the above was preceded by Morgan Freeman mourning his Unforgiven co-star Gene Hackman, and ended with a clip of the two time Oscar winning actor. Investigations on his death painted some depressing final days: Hackman's wife Betsy Arakawa suddenly died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, he didn't notice due to advanced Alzheimer's disease only for his heart to stop a week later, and another week passed before the police entered the house and discovered their corpses. (along with one of a dog in a crate not far from Arakawa, presumably left forgotten once the two people who cared for it were unable to let it out) |
| 6 | Kieran Culkin | |
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Who would've thought that 35 years after Home Alone, the bedwetting cousin would have an Emmy and an Oscar to his name? Breaking even further from the shadow of brother Macaulay Culkin, Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor at #4 for A Real Pain, where he plays the cousin of Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed the movie) who is taken by him on a trip to discover the family's roots in Poland. |
| 7 | The Brutalist | |
1,413,210 |  |
This ambitious tale of a Hungarian-Jewish architect/Holocaust survivor who goes to the United States is exceptionally made and acted, but its three and a half hour runtime is basically an endurance test, even if theaters added a 15 minute intermission for audiences to rest. Nevertheless, #4 gave this movie three Oscars, Best Actor for #3, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score. |
| 8 | Al Green (politician) | |
1,337,742 |  |
A Democratic Party representative from Texas, he repeatedly interrupted Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress on March 4. Green was removed from the chamber by the House Sergeant at Arms, and two days later he was censured by a vote in the House of Representatives. |
| 9 | Georgina Chapman | |
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When #3 won Best Actor for the first time, he kissed Halle Berry on the stage (she delivered some payback in this year's red carpet). This time around the kiss was before leaving the seat on this fashion designer and actress, whose ex-husband Harvey Weinstein was an important and controversial figure in Hollywood before lots of women denounced him for lewd behavior. Part of Brody's unending speech was thanking Chapman's children ("Dash and India, I know it's been a roller coaster but thank you for accepting me into your life. Popsie’s coming home a winner."). |
| 10 | Zoe Saldaña | |
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Lots of movie fans like this actress for – among other things – three interstellar franchises: Star Trek, Avatar, and Guardians of the Galaxy. So her winning Best Supporting Actress at #4 was widely celebrated. Though many would've preferred Saldaña's recognition came from something other than the controversial Emilia Pérez, where she plays a lawyer enrolled by a cartel kingpin to help fake his death while arranging his sex change. |
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee (March 9 to 15)
[edit]| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mark Carney | |
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Following the resignation of #10, Carney won the 2025 Liberal Party of Canada leadership election with over 85% of the vote to become the leader of the party, and consequently the prime minister of Canada, though he does not hold a seat in the House of Commons of Canada. An economist by trade, he served as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, then as the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Carney is expected to lead his party into the 2025 Canadian federal election amid the backdrop of an escalating trade war with the US, and continuing threats of annexation from Donald Trump. |
| 2 | Deaths in 2025 | |
984,431 |  |
I guess what I'm tryin' to say is I need the deep end Keep imaginin' meetin', wished away entire lifetimes... |
| 3 | ICC Champions Trophy | |
959,698 |  |
The ninth edition of this cricket tournament concluded on March 9 with India emerging victorious in the final by defeating New Zealand (who were eyeing their second title after 2000), thus becoming the first team to win the tournament three times after 2002 and 2013. After 2013 victory, it took 11 years for India to claim title in any ICC tournaments last year; The 2017 final of this tournament was also contested by India, but they lost to Pakistan who hosted the tournament this year, although the final was held in Dubai. This marks India's second consecutive title in ICC events. |
| 4 | Mickey 17 | |
826,441 |  |
After winning three Oscars for Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho returns with his third Hollywood film, an adaptation of the sci-fi novel Mickey7. Robert Pattinson stars as the "Expendable" Mickey, a disposable worker who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes in the colonization of a distant planet, and an incident with the local wildlife ends up causing the 17th and 18th Mickeys to live simultaneously. Reviewers liked the movie and it opened atop the U.S. box office, but the numbers were low compared to the high expenses (an $118 million budget, along with estimated $80 million in marketing) and raised the possibility of a flop. |
| 5 | Severance (TV series) | |
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This American science fiction psychological thriller Apple TV+ series created by Dan Erickson and primarily directed by Ben Stiller (pictured) released its ninth episode of the second season, setting up the stage for the season 2 finale. |
| 6 | March 2025 lunar eclipse | |
763,361 |  |
The first North American total lunar eclipse comes 11 months after the April 8 total solar eclipse. I was living in the path of totality for both of them, although the one on April 8 easily took the crown. A lunar eclipse happens when the Moon moves into Earth's shadow, causing it to glow an orange-red color. Incredibly, Blue Ghost Mission 1 captured the lunar eclipse on the Moon, as you can see to the left. It looks exactly like a total solar eclipse, because it is! |
| 7 | Gene Hackman | |
740,790 |  |
One more week for the deceased actor who – despite an underwhelming last movie, Welcome to Mooseport – had a respectable filmography of 5 decades, winning Oscars for The French Connection and Unforgiven, and having other notable roles like Lex Luthor in Superman and its sequels. Hackman's will ignored his three children and had his equally deceased wife Betsy Arakawa (who died a week prior to him, only advanced Alzheimer's made Hackman not notice) as his sole inheritor. |
| 8 | Kim Sae-ron | |
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One month after this South Korean actor died of suicide, members of her family claimed that Kim Soo-hyun had been in a six-year relationship with her beginning in 2015, when she was 15 and he was 27. Dating rumors first surfaced in 2024 after she posted then deleted a photo of the two of them. To add more fuel to the fire, she died on the same day as his birthday. After initially denying the relationship, his agency eventually published a statement claiming that they dated from 2019 to 2020, when she was 19 to 20 and he was 31 to 32. |
| 9 | Elon Musk | |
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Amidst Elon's political moves, his most famous company, Tesla, has seen a dramatic fall in stock price. Since its peak around Inauguration Day, it has fallen by about 40%, wiping out over $100 billion from Elon's net worth. This has been caused due to a variety of factors, including rapidly declining sales in Europe and China, protestors worldwide vandalizing any Teslas they can find, and the fact that his political stances make him despised by the company's main demographic |
| 10 | Justin Trudeau | |
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After 10 years as prime minister of Canada, Trudeau has called it quits. On the domestic front, his government introduced measures such as child benefit payments for families, legalized euthanasia, legalized recreational cannabis, and introduced a carbon tax. The Aga Khan affair in 2017, SNC-Lavalin affair in 2019 and WE Charity scandal damaged his reputation, though he survived. Following the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, his government implemented an assault-weapons ban. In 2022, he invoked the Emergencies Act in response against the Canada convoy protest, and following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he imposed sanctions on Russia and authorized military aid to Ukraine. His popularity declined even further in the last few years of his tenure, as Canada experiences high inflation, increased cost of living and a housing crisis. In 2023, he and his wife announced their separation, and after his party lost several by-elections and his deputy unexpectedly resigned in 2024, Trudeau announced on January 6, 2025, that he would resign after his party elects a new leader, which was won by #1. Trudeau regained some popularity in the last few weeks in office, as he responded to tariffs and threats of annexation from Donald Trump with counter-tariffs and strong words. |
Exclusions
[edit]- 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.
Most edited articles
[edit]For the February 17 – March 17 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths in 2025 | 2059 | Our version of the Academy Awards' In memoriam. Only without apocalyptic chants, unexplainable dance performances and the like. |
| Department of Government Efficiency | 2026 | Elon Musk spearheads this initiative that is supposed to cut down government spending, mostly through mass layoffs and cutting the funding of selected projects. It has been divisive. |
| List of plays adapted into feature films | 1408 | Now split into three pages (A to I, J to Q, R to Z) because there are so many of those movies. |
| 2025 Trump–Zelenskyy meeting | 1128 | On February 24, the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the president of Ukraine was welcoming a dozen leaders at Kyiv, many of whom were finally taking the opportunity to announce further financial and military aid. Zelenskyy then traveled to Washington, D.C. for a meeting with Donald Trump, which devolved into a tense confrontation. Trump threatened to withdraw US support if Ukraine did not make a ceasefire agreement with Russia, in which Zelenskyy replied that such a deal is unacceptable to Ukraine without security guarantees. Trump also accused Zelenskyy of "gambling with World War III", while vice president JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of being "disrespectful" and not showing enough gratitude for US help. With Trump demanding an apology from Zelenskyy and further US-Ukraine cooperation facing an uncertain future in the aftermath of the fiery meeting, Zelenskyy flew to London, where he received a much warmer reception from Charles III and prime minister Keir Starmer, and attended a summit with more than a dozen countries to formulate a peace plan to take to the US. |
| Gene Hackman | 1031 | Frequent updates were required as more was learned regarding the beloved actor's death. |
| 2025 massacres of Syrian Alawites | 970 | Ever since the Assad regime fell in December, its old loyalists and the incumbent Syrian transitional government have been in conflict in Western Syria, and once the fighting escalated on March 6, so did the killings of the Alawites living in the region, with numbers that might be as high as 1,700 deaths. |
| Timeline of the Gaza war (19 January 2025 – present) | 878 | As the ceasefire took place with hostages-and-prisoners exchanges, isolated instances of conflict happened, leading accusations of Israel not respecting the armistice. Proposals for extension were rejected. Humanitarian aid to Gaza was blocked again. And then more Israeli bombs hit Gaza. In short, after a brief respite this resumed being terrible and can't end soon enough. |
| 2024 YR4 | 798 | This asteroid continues to be observed, particularly for the possibility of an impact with Earth or the Moon. |
| Career of Lionel Messi | 796 | One year after its creation, this page has a template warning that it's too big (currently at over 350 KB), given Messi has been active for 20 years with basically all accomplishments a football player can get. A proposal to split between a page for his club career and another for him with Argentina's national team was shot down. |
| 2025 German federal election | 786 | As mentioned above, voters in Europe's biggest economy have chosen the next members of the Bundestag. |
| 2025 ICC Champions Trophy | 732 | This cricket tournament concluded on March 9 with India emerging victorious in the final by defeating New Zealand (who were eyeing their second title after 2000), thus becoming the first team to win the tournament for a third time, after their 2002 and 2013 feats. |
| 97th Academy Awards | 724 | Hollywood's biggest night. It had the good (Brazil and Latvia's first wins, Sean Baker becoming the first director, and only the second person after Walt Disney, with four Oscars in the same night), the bad (awarding Best Original song to Emilia Pérez when either Elton John or 16 time loser Diane Warren could win instead, not helped by some awkward impromptu singing at the podium) and the weird (why a James Bond tribute, complete with three song performances? If only the opportunity also served to announce the 007th 007 it would be justified!). |
| Delta Connection Flight 4819 | 705 | A plane that crashed and turned when landing in Toronto, with no casualties but 21 injuries. |
| List of Tau Beta Pi members | 699 | One user is expanding this article to note which of the over 635,000 members of this American honor society for engineering are particularly notable. |
| ICC Champions Trophy | 681 | A cricket tournament that was revived after 8 years and will have its tenth edition in 2029. |
WikiPortraits rule!
- Celebrity photos became a big news story this month. See this issue's In the media and Essay articles for more on this topic.
The media have been complaining that the photos in Wikipedia's articles on celebrities are not of adequate quality. But they've also noted that project WikiPortraits is making progress in replacing bad celebrity portraits. The Signpost presents a selection from project WikiPortraits below.
Celebrities who cannot wait for WikiPortraits or other Wiki photographers to find them have at least two other options.
- Take a selfie and upload it to Wikimedia Commons. Anybody can do it!
- Have your agent arrange a photo session with a professional photographer who agrees to license the photos CC-BY SA 4.0 and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. As with almost every photo on Wikipedia, these will be available to everybody to use as long as they give proper attribution.
WikiPortraits's excellent photos
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June Squibb (2024 Sundance Film Festival)
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Frodo (2024 Sundance Film Festival) -
Goh Nakamura (2024 Sundance 2024)
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Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (SXSW 2024) -
Conan O'Brien (SXSW 2024) -
Yukari Kane (2024 International Journalism Festival) -
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Fayza Shama (2024 Cannes Film Festival)
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Meryl Streep (2024 Cannes Film Festival) -
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami (2024 Cannes Film Festival)
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Taylor Russell (81st Venice International Film Festival)
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Manjiri Papula (2024 Toronto International Film Festival)
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Paul Rudd (2024 Toronto International Film Festival) -
Vanessa Kirby (2024 Toronto International Film Festival) -
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Mikey Madison (2024 New York Film Festival) -
Aaliyah Bilal (2024 U.S. National Book Award) -
Shigemitsu Tanaka (2024 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony) -
Simon Johnson (2024 Nobel Prizes Lectures)
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Anna M. Gomez (2025 Knight Media Forum) -
Hideo Kojima (SXSW 2025)
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AJ Andrews (SXSW 2025)
Photographers
[edit]Frank Schulenburg, Fuzheado, Jay Dixit, Jennifer 8. Lee, Kevin Payravi, Frank Sun, Bryan Berlin, Harald Krichel, Adam Chitayat, Bea Phi, John Sears, Sriya Sarkar, AirEdits, Kirby Taylor
Unusual biographical images
- This is an essay on Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. You may edit this page at Wikipedia:Unusual biographical images but not on The Signpost.
- This page in a nutshell: While turning an unillustrated article into an illustrated one is undoubtedly an important task, editors should use common sense when doing so for articles about living people: Consider not adding extremely low-quality or otherwise questionable biographical images.
Having no picture is better than what's currently there—a rare occurrence on Wikipedia.
English Wikipedia's policies on copyrights and image use mean that we can only use own-work, freely-licensed, or public-domain images in articles, and can only use copyrighted images under Wikipedia's special and very strict (stricter than the law) non-free content criteria. Not only are these criteria strict, photographs of living people typically also fail the separate "unacceptable use" guidelines, which act like a redundancy layer to make it extra certain that non-free images of living people are not used.
Copyrighted photographs of living people generally fail already at the first non-free content criterion: "No free equivalent". It states that where a free equivalent could be created, a non-free photograph of a living person may not be used, because in most cases, a photograph of a living person can be taken and released under a free licence
. This is based simply on the fact that the person is living. "Unacceptable use" guidelines include the provision against using non-free pictures of people still alive ...; provided that taking a new free picture as a replacement (which is almost always considered possible) would serve the same encyclopedic purpose as the non-free image
(WP:NFC#UULP), and the provision against using a photo from a press agency or photo agency ..., unless the photo itself is the subject of sourced commentary in the article
(WP:GETTY), which is especially relevant for celebrities.
At the same time, there is a very strong desire by editors to add images to articles, and many editors see it as an "easy way to improve the encyclopedia". This aligns with the idealized progression scheme for each article: According to the guideline for assessing the quality of a Wikipedia article, even "Start-class" articles need to either include an image or have some other very basic feature expected of any article, and "Good articles" are required to have an image (unless it is impossible to obtain one). Consequently, editors almost never agree that no image is better than at least some image, and in biographies, adding the subject's photo as the lead image is particularly seen as a top priority. To this end, contributors will take photographs of notable living subjects themselves, or come up with free images of living subjects in some roundabout way, such as by cropping a freely licensed or public-domain image in which the article subject is not the main subject.
Because of this, we occasionally end up with some peculiar and questionable biographical photos. The phenomenon is inherent to articles about living people, because the perverse incentive discussed in the previous paragraphs attaches to an assumption that a living person could be photographed, but in some aspects it extends to articles about dead people as well. These unusual biographical images may be low in visual quality, taken from afar, a non-facial angle or show their subject in a unique situation ...sometimes a very unique situation. All of the photos included below are either in use or were previously in use on English Wikipedia. Feel free to add more.
And if there's an article about you, and you don't like the picture (or there is none), what should you do? See our handy guide, "A photo of you".
Academia
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Politics
[edit]Politicians
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Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards
[edit]For several members of the Ba'ath Party, the only freely-available images are from the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards set produced by the U.S. Government. Some of these cards contain no photographs at all, with generic silhouettes being used to illustrate the subjects.
Other
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Visual arts
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Biographical images that are unusual but also highly justified
[edit]The following images depict the subject in a peculiar pose, state, or situation, or while performing a particular activity they are known for, either of which is either tied to the reason why the subject is notable, and/or there is a meaningful link between the given peculiar aspect of the photograph and the article's prose. Such images are therefore significant and relevant in the topic's context
and look like what they are meant to illustrate
. They may also be of fairly high quality (but not necessarily).
See also
[edit]- Wikipedia:A photo of you - how to supply an image if there is an article about you and it lacks one, or has one and you're not happy with it
- Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons § Images
- Wikipedia:Image use policy § Moral issues
- Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in file deletion discussions § Low resolution
- Wikipedia:Image dos and don'ts
- Wikipedia:Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia
- Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people
Rest in peace
Ward Christensen, with co-creator Randy Suess, created the first bulletin board system (BBS) in 1978. They wrote the first BBS software, called CBBS, and brought the first BBS system online, also called CBBS. An online culture coalesced around the new technology that came of age in the 1980s and reached a peak during the 1990s, and for many people it became their first introduction to wide area networking, before the Internet was commonly available. Anyone could set up a BBS in their home for the cost of a phone line and dedicated PC, and share email, files, and message boards with the wider world. He also invented the XMODEM protocol, to transfer files between computers over a modem; it influenced other protocols such as ZMODEM that were at the core of the BBS world. Ward first edited Wikipedia in 2006, and made contributions until 2020.[4] – G
Andrei Filotti (b. 1930, Bucharest, Romania – d. 2024, Arlington, Virginia, United States) was a hydroelectrical engineer and son of the diplomat Eugen Filotti. He made major contributions in water management in Romania, but also in other countries under the auspices of the United Nations Organization. He made over 52,000 edits on the English Wikipedia from 2006 to 2024, many of which were about rivers in Romania. On the Romanian Wikipedia he was an administrator and a stalwart of the community; see his article and obituary there. – G87, T
| This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alvaro. |  |