Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single
Wikipedian and physician Ziyad al-Sufiani reportedly released from Saudi prison
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On 11 March 2025, British–Saudi-Arabian human rights organisation ALQST stated on X that Saudi medical doctor and Wikipedian Ziyad al-Sufiani (User:Ziad) had been released from al-Ha'ir prison "after over four and a half years of arbitrary imprisonment" for "editing pages like that of Saudi [women human rights defender] Loujain al-Hathloul".
A former editor and administrator of the Arabic Wikipedia, Ziyad was originally arrested back in 2020, together with his fellow doctor and editor Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK), and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment; Osama remains in al-Ha'ir Prison, according to ALQST, as he is currently serving a 32-year prison term, which had in turn been increased from a five-year term in September 2022.
Both were longtime volunteer contributors, having signed up in the late 2000s and since made tens of thousands of edits on a wide range of projects, attending conferences and contributing to projects like the Wiki Project Med Foundation. Both were particularly supportive of online global collaborations, known personally to Wikimedia editors in many countries, visible in their contributions, and notably absent from the communities in which they edited after their arrests.
Khalid and al-Sufiani's imprisonment, on the charge of "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals", first came to public attention and wider media coverage in January 2023, when the news was broken by the organizations SMEX and DAWN (the latter co-founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi). This revelation came amid a series of group bans of Arabic Wikipedia editors by the Wikimedia Foundation — including a quarter of that project's administrators — citing an investigation which had uncovered a group of users coordinating to push a political agenda who had "close connections with external parties [that were] a source of serious concern for the safety of our users". DAWN said that these banned users had been "recruited to serve as government agents to control information about the country and prosecut[e] those who contributed critical information about political detainees"; the WMF said that the DAWN report contained inaccuracies, and that there had been no evidence to suggest government infiltration. More in-depth analysis, including the Arabic Wikipedia's reaction to the actions, can be found in Signpost coverage of the January 2023 events.
By January 2024, both remained imprisoned, and an open letter signed by nine civil rights organizations demanded their immediate release.
While this is by no means the first time that names have been added to the list of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia, and will almost certainly not be the last, this release provides a moment of relief for those who have followed the case. Still, incidents like this serve to demonstrate the limits not only of community governance but also of Foundation support and oversight in protecting the safety of editors under authoritarian regimes.
WMF to explore "common standards" for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear
On 27 March, the Wikimedia Foundation posted on Diff an article named "Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view", writing:
To support the Wikimedia communities and reaffirm our commitment to neutrality, the Wikimedia Foundation will convene a working group of active editors, Trustees, researchers, and advisors to explore recommendations for common standards for NPOV policies that can protect Wikipedia, increase the integrity of the projects, and equip the volunteers trusted to administer these policies with more support.
These conversations will be grounded in the foundational principles underlying NPOV, designed to present a fair, neutral description of the facts without compromising the exploration of ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Reaffirming Wikipedia's neutrality in response to what we are seeing in the world makes this highly trusted resource even more resilient in its mission to serve accurate, reliable information.
A copy of the whole Diff article can be found at this issue's News from Diff column; a slightly different article on the same general theme was posted on Meta-Wiki.
This would mark the first time the WMF ever attempted to drive a review, or reform, of one of the Wikipedia community's core content policies across all languages. As referred to in the post itself, staff leadership of Wikimedia Foundation, trustees, and selected Wikimedia editors discussed the topic at a recent Wikimedia Foundation workshop in March, where editors with extended rights, those trusted by their communities with administering NPOV policies, described the challenges they face when these policies are unclear or underdeveloped in some languages.
As of press time, no mention of this initiative (or further plans) had been made to the English Wikipedia's NPOV noticeboard, although the ten Google results for the Diff post's headline included the above links as well as a Wikipediocracy thread and this very Signpost draft. Some discussion has occured at Meta-Wiki.
During the workshop, the participants agreed that they would best support Wikimedia projects in addressing issues related to neutral and verifiable information through establishing "global standards around neutral point of view/neutrality, and better cross-wiki learning about policies, such as spaces for policy-focused bilateral conversations between wikis, and a policy exchange led by volunteers, allowing the projects to learn from each other".
Continually refining and improving our processes, workflows and policies — even the most important ones — is a crucial part of what makes Wikipedia able to adapt itself for a changing world, and a changing editoriat. This much is clear. And, since this project appears to be in its early stages, some ambiguity in specific implementation details is natural. However, there remain some unresolved questions with respect to the intended relationship between the Foundation and community governance, which seem critical to its successful implementation.
When asked to clarify some of these points on the talk page of the Meta announcement, a Foundation staff member did not provide specific answers, but indicated that the WMF was planning to share more information at a later date:
I'm writing up a summary of this announcement for the Signpost in a couple days -- could I get some clarification on what this section of the post means? Is there any information on who the "advisors" are to be, and what role is envisioned for this working group (and its common standards) with respect to local project governance? Is this meant to provide resources for projects who request assistance, or is it compulsory?
— User:JPxG 00:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
Hi @JPxG:, the goal of this working group will be to review neutral point of view (NPOV) policies on the Wikimedia projects and propose recommendations for common standards. The first step will be an analysis on the state of neutrality policies and principles across Wikimedia projects. This will include opportunities for volunteers to share links and suggestions on what resources might be useful. Based on this analysis of existing policies and working closely with communities, the working group will develop specific recommendations for common standards. In terms of advisors, we will invite researchers - who share Wikipedia's goal of encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view - to contribute to this work. We are planning to share more information in the next two weeks by mid-April.
— User:NSzafran-WMF 21:10, 3 April 2025 (UTC)
Whether this latest move stands to reflect a major change in how neutrality is approached across the global Wikimedia movement, a meaningful shift in Foundation–community dynamics, or simply the very early stages of a still-forming planning effort remains to be seen.
Much depends on how the working group is put together, and what role it (as well as the community) ultimately envisions being filled. The Signpost will continue monitoring developments — particularly once the working group's scope and authority become clearer.
Indian judges demand removal of content critical of Asian News International
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Delhi High Court orders removal of material on Asian News International from Wikipedia
A new Delhi High Court ruling in the ongoing case between the Wikimedia Foundation and Asian News International (ANI) required the WMF to remove "defamatory" content concerning the Indian press agency from its Wikipedia page.
Media coverage of the ruling included articles from Deccan Herald ("Delhi High Court orders Wikipedia to remove allegedly defamatory description of ANI from its page"); Bar and Bench ("Delhi High Court orders Wikipedia to takedown defamatory edits on ANI page"); The Indian Express ("In a first, Delhi High Court directs Wikipedia to remove ‘defamatory’ content on news agency ANI"); and Reuters ("Wikimedia must remove India content deemed defamatory, court rules").
According to The Indian Express, it was "the first ruling by an Indian court in which Wikipedia has been directed to remove defamatory content". As of this issue's publication, Reuters, which owns 26 percent of ANI, but is not involved in the agency's operations, did not respond to a request for comment. On Monday, Reuters cited unnamed sources who stated that Wikipedia filed an appeal, and an Indian newspaper said that one High Court judge had recused himself from the case.
The Delhi High Court will continue to hear the case, in which ANI seeks damages of about 20 million rupees (roughly $240,000) and an apology from the Wikimedia Foundation; last December, a Judge hearing the WMF's appeal of a possible injunction in the case, said that he would read the sources used to reference the alleged defamation on the article for ANI – see related Signpost coverage at our December 2024 In the media report.
In January, the WMF took the case to a hearing at the Supreme Court of India, which reportedly expressed concern over the Delhi High Court's reasoning for the takedown order, with at least two judges noting that the case would have broad implications for press freedom – see related Signpost coverage at our March 2025 report.
You can also read the November 2024 In focus report for more context on the court case. – B and O
Take two and call me in the morning
"Wikipedia May Be the Antidote to Trumpism" (audio with transcript), according to WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show. Matt Katz interviews Margaret Talbot, of The New Yorker. Her article 'Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia' was reviewed in this column last month. Talbot glowingly explains the Wikipedia editing process. Then Katz lobs a softball "You did write ... that Wikipedia is in almost every aspect the inverse of Trumpism. ... Why do some people refer to the site as the last good place on the Internet, and why is it an inverse to Trumpism?" Talbot knocks it out of the park, listing transparency on the talk and history pages, clear "policies and practices", and "a real dedication to using reporting from reliable news sources." Later she praises the reliable sources/perennial sources page and contrasts the Wiki to Elon Musk's Dickipedia proposal and his stiff-arm salute. – S
French Wiki vs. Le Point dispute sparks media coverage frenzy
In the last few weeks, the current dispute between the French Wikipedia and French news magazine Le Point has been covered by several national media outlets: Le Monde has published a detailed article on the matter (behind pay-wall), as Le Parisien (with two different articles) and La Voix du Nord (at this link) have done.
The same story also drew attention from all over the political spectrum, including centre-right newspaper Le Figaro (at this link), right-wing magazine Marianne (which also addressed their own dispute with the Les sans pagEs project) and left-wing magazine Politis (at this link). Historian and professor Jean-Luc Chappey has also written an opinion article in defense of fr.wiki for Libération; the same side has been picked by Mathilde Panot, the current President of the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, in a YouTube video. And, of course, Le Point itself has published lots of op-eds and articles on the case involving one of their journalists.
Finally, Canadian French-language network Ici Radio-Canada also reported on the case (in audio format), as well as English-language portal Brussels Signal.
For more context on the case involving the French Wikipedia and Le Point, see the News and notes and Community view columns from the February 27 issue. – O
Wikipedia probably not among the victims of Google's "AI Overviews"
interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with themthat
[t]he now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers [above regular search results] — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet(not unlike media coverage of various previous algorithm updates in past decades). This conclusion was disputed by a Google spokesperson, who pointed out that website traffic can also change due to other reasons. In any case,
Google has said AI Overviews is driving more traffic to a diverse mix of publishers, but the company hasn’t provided data to back up that assertion. According to the data firm BrightEdge, the sites receiving the most referral traffic from AI Overviews are primarily big players, like TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, Mayo Clinic and Google’s own YouTube, rather than smaller publishers.
More specifically, the cited SEO firm, BrightEdge, reports that wikipedia.org is among the Domains [that] Are Sourced the Most
: It has about 11% "Share of Citations in AIO" (apparently meaning the percentage of all AI overviews sampled by BrightEdge that provided at least one Wikipedia page as a citation, possibly among other sources). Still, this is much lower than the top two domains, which belong to the NIH (ca. 31%) and the Mayo Clinic (ca. 28%) - BrightEdge notes that our data skew[s] to healthcare
.
On its blog, the firm had also published several somewhat breathless updates about month-to-month changes in the data, occasionally mentioning Wikipedia. During June 2024 (shortly after Google's general launch of the feature in the US), [c]itations for wikipedia.org declined 28% from the start to the end of the month [June 2024]. This may indicate a shift away from general knowledge sources towards more specialized, authoritative references [such as cdc.gov for medical content]
. A month later, BrightEdge reported that Wikipedia showed a slight decline of about 5% in daily search volume
from June to July.
Still, such fluctuations have to be weighed against the benefit of Wikipedia being linked in the AI Overviews at all (as opposed to the smaller websites in the Bloomberg article). Especially considering that according to BrightEdge, [t]he average AI Overview result has expanded to 1,000 pixels tall—a 50% increase since August 2024—pushing traditional organic results further down the page.
– H
In brief
- Feed me, I'm hungry: Wikipedia Built the Internet's Brain. Now Its Leaders Want Credit. The New York Observer talks to Wikimedia Foundation execs who say there's "rapacious" content scraping to feed AI training, and regurgitation of community generated content without attribution (their viewpoint is spelled out at this issue's Op-ed). See also these related articles: [1] [2] [3] [4]
- Trump nominees "trashed", "smeared": Washington Examiner and New York Post, both considered right of center, used a report from conservative watchdog Media Research Center to heap scorn on Wikipedia and its editors:
- "How biased Wikipedia trashed Trump’s nominees — after he named them" New York Post
- "Wikipedia posts updated to smear Patel, Hegseth, Gabbard: Watchdog", Washington Examiner.
- Controversial moratorium: Wikipedia Editors Place Moratorium on Controversial Sentence in Zionism Article from Jewish Journal; the author says his prior reporting "highlighted how the [now locked-in] sentence [in the lede of 'Zionism'] resulted from anti-Israel editors primarily citing anti-Zionist historians"
- Colorful globe: "Wikipedia for Palestine", cover story for print issue of March 21–27 Jewish Journal, replete with full page white-black-green-red banded puzzle globe.
- You ain't nobody until...: "How obscure is prospective Celtics buyer William Chisholm? He didn't have a Wikipedia page until Thursday." in the Boston Globe. (claim confirmed - article created 20 March 15:52 UTC)
- Deconstructing Wiki bias: Deconstructing Wikipedia: It’s biased, lopsided and partisan in India's Sunday Guardian accuses Wikipedia of serious structural bias in its articles about India. It's a step above the usual complaints seen in some newspapers which come down to something like "We disagree, so you must be biased." Here the author, a senior police official, identifies several areas of potential bias, e.g. Hindu traditions and religious practices, policies promoted by the current right-wing government as opposed to Western liberal policies, India's border disputes, caste systems, gender inequality, and cow protection laws. He makes a case that admins and arbs are mostly western and lack an understanding of Indian realities. He does not seem to understand what Indians can do to work better within Wikipedia's quality control systems. This is a good article to read first if editors want to address a long-standing problem, but it could be a long slog before both sides come together to work together to solve the problem. – S
- Wiki Asteroids: The "game Asteroids [using] Wikipedia edits to drive the volume and size of the objects hurling towards your ship", via Nathan Yau's FlowingData blog
- Hour-long Zero Hour: Blaze Media TV show Zero Hour talks to Larry Sanger under the web title "Wikipedia scandal exposed: Big Tech manipulates what you see"
- Pravda Network: Russian disinformation in the so-called Pravda Network has been incorporated by Wikipedia, reports the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [5], citing Digital Forensic Research Lab report. Pravda Network was created for "LLM grooming", a disinformation attack against large language model AI.
- NOTCENSORED: Former Wikimedia Foundation CEO, and current NPR CEO Katherine Maher stated during testimony to United States House Oversight Committee that "Wikipedia never censored any information" during her tenure, during grilling on NPR's coverage of COVID, and other touchy subjects. According to Fox News, chairperson Greene rebutted the witness by "noting comments she [Maher] made when she was CEO of Wikipedia [sic] and accusing her of censoring information related to the COVID pandemic." The committee hearing was titled "Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable".
- Spring and Fall: Wikipedia now has a page on the "Balkan Spring", BGNES News Agency (bg:БГНЕС) reports. However, the article was deleted on 2 April, apparently without being archived.
- Don't promote paid editing like that, though!: Katie Whyatt recently wrote for The Athletic on how the opportunities for scouting in women's soccer are still limited outside of the top leagues. Among the interviewees for the article, there was Jamie Smith, the founder of independent scouting software InScout Network, which he described as "a portfolio online that you can share", or "almost a bit like looking on Wikipedia or Transfermarkt for players who haven't got the finances to have that or someone to update their Wikipedia."
- What's my page again?: Italian online newspaper Il Post is one of the media outlets that have reported on recent improvements to image generation and text rendering featured on ChatGPT's new default model, GPT-4o; among other examples, the article cited an instance where a user asked the chatbot to recreate a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for cats, filled with images and proper explanations for their vital systems. We're not quite sure what "animal rogans" means, but it seemingly worked, nonetheless.
- Purple people eaters?: The Wikimedians of Minnesota User Group disbanded in 2020, soon after its formation, due to COVID, but it has now made a comeback with an in-person meeting in Saint Paul on April 6, as reported by local news website Racket. If you think editing Minnesota-centered articles is all about Prince and purple people eaters, think again. You can argue about the spelling of Jucy Lucy, or edit war on the Dakota War of 1862 or other military articles. There's lots of room for articles on rural towns, trains, the Hmong, and probably a few grain silo historic sites. In other words, Wikipedia editing at its finest. If this doesn't grab you, just stop by the next user group meeting for some stuffed sausages and beer. Enjoy!
- Can we get a re-write, please?: 404 Media noted the creation of the article 2025 stock market crash (during the week we went to print with this edition of The Signpost), "arguably writing one of the first drafts of history".
- Why Do These Two People Represent All Humans On Wikipedia?: That's the question that IFLScience asked about the image illustrating the article Human. The answers are more subtle than one might guess, and of course imbued with deep Wiki-ness.
35,000 user accounts compromised, locked in attempted credential-stuffing attack
Over 35,000 accounts compromised and locked
The Foundation announced that it has locked 35,893 accounts that were found to be compromised after a credential stuffing attack. Apparently, no accounts that utilized two-factor authentication were affected.
WMF representatives stated on the Meta page for the announcement that:
We don't currently have any reason to believe Wikimedia's systems were the source of the compromise, nor do we have any evidence that any particular user or group of users, or any specific community were targeted.
A discussion on English Wikipedia ensued over at the Village Pump. Off-wiki discussions of the matter happened in the Discord, which anyone using Discord is welcome to join through https://discord.com/invite/wikipedia .– B
WikiWikiWeb founder interviewed in the wake of the platform's 30th anniversary
On March 25, 1995, American programmer Ward Cunningham officially launched WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki (user-editable website) in history, to accompany the Portland Pattern Repository website discussing software design patterns.
Despite being in read-only mode since February 2015, WikiWikiWeb celebrated its 30th birthday on March 25, 2025. The anniversary gained some media coverage, including from Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (in Italian, behind pay-wall); plus, Cunningham himself has been interviewed by Spanish newspaper El Mundo, as well as MediaWiki developer Yaron Koren – as part of an episode of his Between the Brackets podcast. – O
News from WMF
The programming proposal application phase for Wikimania 2025 has officially closed; the convention's organizers will now review the submitted programs, before starting announcements in May. Set to be hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, from August 5 to 9, 2025, Wikimania 2025 is tied to the theme "Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability", with the organizing team writing:
The theme [...] highlights our vision for a Wikimedia movement that is accessible to all, fosters collaboration across diverse communities, and prioritizes long-term viability. As we celebrate our 20th anniversary, this theme underscores our commitment to addressing global challenges, promoting inclusivity, and ensuring the sustainability of free knowledge for generations to come.
As part of this year's fifth bulletin, it was announced that a new Wikimedia Research Fund is launching: researchers aiming to advance free knowledge through Wikimedia projects can submit their proposals until April 16, with application notifications being set to be issued on May 14. Updates about Wikimedia’s Codex design system, an improved and up-coming Content Translation tool dashboard for all Wikipedias, a new system to select the appropriate file categories, and the latest objectives and key results of the Product & Technology department have all been highlighted, as well.
At a call for volunteers for the Global Resource Distribution Committee (see prior Signpost coverage), a deadline for self-nomination was extended to March 31, and several individuals withdrew their offers to participate. – S, O, and B
Brief notes
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Goldsztajn.
- Active administrators: The number of active administrators is a bit wobbly and hit 447 on 28 March – taking us back to where we were almost exactly a year ago, despite the gains in November 2024 due to administrator elections (see prior Signpost coverage). It fell again to 443 on 7 April 2025, just as we go to press.
- A new admin recall petition passes: The 3rd ever admin recall petition passed earlier last month, gaining the required 25 signatures in under 5 hours. After the petition passed, Master Jay chose to resign at Bureaucrats' Noticeboard.
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Plate (dishware) (beginning 7 April 2025), followed by Honshu (beginning 14 April 2025). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
- This article was originally published at the Wikimedia Foundation's Diff blog on April 1, 2025. It is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. See related articles in this issue In focus, News from Diff, and News and notes. Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis, and Giuseppe Lavagetto are with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Since the beginning of 2024, the demand for the content created by the Wikimedia volunteer community – especially for the 144 million images, videos, and other files on Wikimedia Commons – has grown significantly. In this post, we'll discuss the reasons for this trend and its impact.
The Wikimedia projects are the largest collection of open knowledge in the world. Our sites are an invaluable destination for humans searching for information, and for all kinds of businesses that access our content automatically as a core input to their products. Most notably, the content has been a critical component of search engine results, which in turn has brought users back to our sites. But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone.
A view behind the scenes: The Jimmy Carter case
When Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his page on English Wikipedia saw more than 2.8 million views over the course of a day. This was relatively high, but manageable. At the same time, quite a few users played a 1.5 hour long video of Carter's 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan. This caused a surge in the network traffic, doubling its normal rate. As a consequence, for about one hour a small number of Wikimedia's connections to the Internet filled up entirely, causing slow page load times for some users. The sudden traffic surge alerted our Site Reliability team, who were swiftly able to address this by changing the paths our internet connections go through to reduce the congestion. But still, this should not have caused any issues, as the Foundation is well equipped to handle high traffic spikes during exceptional events. So what happened?
Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.
The graph below shows that the base bandwidth demand for multimedia content has been growing steadily since early 2024 – and there's no sign of this slowing down. This increase in baseline usage means that we have less room to accommodate exceptional events when a traffic surge might occur: a significant amount of our time and resources go into responding to non-human traffic.
65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots
The Wikimedia Foundation serves content to its users through a global network of datacenters. This enables us to provide a faster, more seamless experience for readers around the world. When an article is requested multiple times, we memorize – or cache – its content in the datacenter closest to the user. If an article hasn't been requested in a while, its content needs to be served from the core data center. The request then "travels" all the way from the user's location to the core datacenter, looks up the requested page and serves it back to the user, while also caching it in the regional datacenter for any subsequent user.
While human readers tend to focus on specific – often similar – topics, crawler bots tend to "bulk read" larger numbers of pages and visit also the less popular pages. This means these types of requests are more likely to get forwarded to the core datacenter, which makes it much more expensive in terms of consumption of our resources.
While undergoing a migration of our systems, we noticed that only a fraction of the expensive traffic hitting our core datacenters was behaving how web browsers would usually do, interpreting JavaScript code. When we took a closer look, we found out that at least 65% of this resource-consuming traffic we get for the website is coming from bots, a disproportionate amount given the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total. This high usage is also causing constant disruption for our Site Reliability team, who has to block overwhelming traffic from such crawlers before it causes issues for our readers.
Wikimedia is not alone with this challenge. As noted in our 2025 global trends report, technology companies are racing to scrape websites for human-created and verified information. Content publishers, open source projects, and websites of all kinds report similar issues. Moreover, crawlers tend to access any URL. Within the Wikimedia infrastructure, we are observing scraping not only of the Wikimedia projects, but also of key systems in our developer infrastructure, such as our code review platform or our bug tracker. All of that consumes time and resources that we need to support the Wikimedia projects, contributors, and readers.
Our content is free, our infrastructure is not: Establishing responsible use of infrastructure
Delivering trustworthy content also means supporting a "knowledge as a service" model, where we acknowledge that the whole internet draws on Wikimedia content. But this has to happen in ways that are sustainable for us: How can we continue to enable our community, while also putting boundaries around automatic content consumption? How might we funnel developers and reusers into preferred, supported channels of access? What guidance do we need to incentivize responsible content reuse?
We have started to work towards addressing these questions systemically, and have set a major focus on establishing sustainable ways for developers and reusers to access knowledge content in the Foundation's upcoming fiscal year. You can read more in our draft annual plan: WE5: Responsible Use of Infrastructure. Our content is free, our infrastructure is not: We need to act now to re-establish a healthy balance, so we can dedicate our engineering resources to supporting and prioritizing the Wikimedia projects, our contributors and human access to knowledge.
Crawlers, hogs and gorillas
- This article gives the opinions of the author which do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost or its staff, any other Wikipedia editors, or of the Wikimedia Foundation. See related articles in this issue at Op-ed, News from Diff, and News and notes.
Hogs at the trough
Have you noticed that Wikipedia pages have been loading more slowly over the last year? The Wikimedia Foundation has. See the Op-ed in this issue. Wikipedia is one of the largest sources of training data for most, perhaps all, of the large language models behind AI products, and it appears that the slowdown has been caused by the AI firms' bots scraping Wikimedia content. The "amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs", according to the WMF.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
— Jimmy Wales, 2004
We need a place on the web where ordinary people, every single one of us, are given priority over mere corporations. That place is Wikipedia.
While limiting immediate access by for-profit corporations to Wikimedia data may seem harsh, it is needed to ensure that human readers and editors have access. It’s already being done, "Site Reliability Engineers have had to enforce on a case-by-case basis rate limiting or banning of crawlers repeatedly to protect our infrastructure."
This is consistent with the WMF's Terms of Use which prohibit
- Engaging in automated uses of the Project Websites that are abusive or disruptive of the services, violate acceptable usage policies where available, or have not been approved by the Wikimedia community;
- Disrupting the services by placing an undue burden on an API, Project Website or the networks or servers connected with a particular Project Website...
— From Terms of Use - under Refraining from Certain Activities
Given the drastic change in corporate demand for our compendium of knowledge, it might be worthwhile for the WMF to modify the Terms of Use to further stress the priority of people over corporations by requiring registration of corporate bots, and cutting off the bots and imposing adequate fines when they impose costs on Wikipedia operations. While they are at it, the WMF should impose fines when AI firms ignore the attribution requirement when using material scraped from WMF servers that’s licensed CC-BY-SA.
There is an alternative for the corporations to obtain quick access to Wikipedia’s data while paying their fair share of the cost, WMF's own for-profit corporation Wikimedia Enterprise. The total cost to the corporations may even be lower by dealing with a single source of Wikimedia’s data that is designed to deal with multiple high demand users, rather than each of them having their own bots jostling and elbowing everybody else out of the way for immediate access.
The WMF and the editing community have both done our parts by creating a compendium of knowledge the likes of which the world has never seen, by properly storing the data and giving it away free in an orderly manner. Now the corporations are all fighting for immediate access so that they can repackage the knowledge and then sell a dumbed-down version. The least they can do is pay the costs that they are imposing on others and not act like hogs at the trough.
The gorillas in the room
There is another problem that was discussed on Diff and and is reprinted in this month's Signpost in the News from Diff. But this issue needs to be handled more gently than the case of the AI bots.
The WMF wants to improve the consistency of the understanding and enforcement of our policy on Neutral point of view (NPOV) across all language versions. Traditionally each language version has had great latitude in defining and enforcing its own rules in order to avoid the cultural imperialism that might result from applying concepts of bias from English speaking countries to encyclopedias written, for example, in Croatian, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese.
The very serious problems caused by inconsistent understandings of NPOV include a decade-long effort to stop local admins from imposing a strong nationalist point of view on the Croatian Wikipedia. See these previous Signpost articles.
Eastern European-Russian conflicts also have a long history (2007–2024) of a failure to arrive at an NPOV on a range of articles covered in multiple Arbcom cases with dozens of editor sanctions. Perhaps the most recent cause of the WMF's concern over consistently applying NPOV standards across Wiki projects is the Gaza war and the campaign in the press by the Anti-defamation league, the Heritage Foundation and others questioning Wikipedia’s credibility. Or perhaps the cause is the split between the Republican and Democratic parties in the US in their recognition of simple facts.
Whatever the cause, we should not let our community governance model become completely distorted by the failure to resolve a half-dozen or dozen serious cases. Nevertheless, an attempt to adapt the current model to try to resolve some of these serious cases within a shorter time should be welcomed.
One adaptation might be to try to include academics, such as was done in the Croatian case in order to determine what sources can be considered reliable in each case.
It won't be easy, and it won't be cheap getting experts to come in to help decide our most intractable cases, but it may be worthwhile.
Giraffer's RfA debriefing
My request for adminship was closed as successful (221/0/1) on March 1, 2025. This is a debrief of my process to get there, and some takeaways from my experience. I hope you find it informative, or at the very least, interesting. I've broken it up into five sections: not wanting to run, deciding and preparing to run, the RfA itself, reflecting on the process, and thanking people.
Refusing
For roughly three years I had people asking me to run for adminship, and I refused. I didn't want to run for multiple reasons: I didn't think I was qualified, I didn't think I was active enough, I wasn't confident enough, and I didn't want to run during a trial period. Not all of these were true by the end, though—I was elected (partially) because I'm self-reflective, and holding multiple nomination offers whilst claiming you are unqualified doesn't quite embody that.
The biggest bottleneck among these factors was definitely my confidence. For a long time I felt that I was competent in the areas I wanted to do admin work in, but that I hadn't achieved the mastery I felt I needed to run for adminship.
To be clear, RfA's culture was not a reason for my procrastination. I wasn't very worried about the RfA climate. That is not a reflection on whether I thought I would pass or not, but my understanding of the system and how I thought it would treat me if things went south. I think I was probably an unusual candidate in that I opposed multiple (seven) candidates before running, some quite early on. I always tried to be honest but respectful in my opposition, and I think it helped me in my own run—I was able to draw on my votes and think critically about myself. I also thought that knowing how it feels to oppose someone would help me deal with opposition against myself, but I suppose that went untested.
Reconsidering
I reached a point in September 2024 where I was sick of waiting for administrator actions I felt that I could perform myself. My activity and my confidence had both improved, and I decided to start formally planning for an RfA. I briefly considered running in the admin elections, but I felt they would be too unpredictable and that my relatively low name recognition would benefit from more individual attention, not less.
In early December, I reached out to Kevin (L235) to ask what he thought my chances were at a run in February. His assessment was very positive, and he offered to nominate me. I thought it would be good to have a co-nom with a slightly different body of work, and so I messaged Lee Vilenski, who had offered me a nomination a few months earlier. Both of them were happy to jointly nominate me.
Running
I'd agreed with my nominators that Kevin would create the page late GMT on the Friday, and I'd transclude Saturday morning (GMT). I got really sick pretty much immediately after transcluding—the sickest I had been in 10 or so years. I am IMMENSELY grateful that I was asked very few questions, and had I been asked the more common 10–15, I would have seriously considered asking the bureaucrats to put the RfA on hold for a few days. The whole run went extremely smoothly, thankfully.
I am under no illusion that I had a difficult or stressful RfA. I never saw an oppose vote, I only made eight edits to the RfA page, and I was asked the fewest questions of any unopposed RfA candidate in over eight years. The run really was as mundane as it seems. I spent most of the first four days watching Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend clips and sleeping.
Reflections
Per the previous paragraph, I'm not going to give advice on how to navigate a stressful run, but I do have some tips and observations I think could be useful.
- The best decision I made throughout the entire RfA process was waiting. If I ran with my first nomination offer, I probably would have done no better than a cratchat and even if I passed, I would have been overwhelmed. Nobody is destined to pass, let alone pass unopposed; hell, I would even say that anyone who genuinely thinks they will pass unopposed is probably either too naive or too arrogant to be an admin.
- Stay honest with yourself when preparing. I was re-reading my old content in preparation and realized that I did not like the way my AMPOL GA was written whatsoever. I'd never been particularly pleased with it, but knowing it would come under scrutiny, I rewrote pretty much the whole thing. It wasn't fun (at ALL), but it definitely improved the article and gave me the confidence to go into my RfA less doubtful of my work. In truth, that article was my biggest concern going into my RfA, and in the end nobody mentioned it. I can't say that would have happened had I not worked on it in February.
- Make sure you actually answer Q3. It asks about a time you were stressed or involved in a conflict. It doesn't ask for an impersonal rehashing of WP:DISPUTE. Make sure your answer couldn’t have been written by anyone else—the situation I gave in my answer (disputing a maintenance tag on something I wrote) was pretty trivial, but it won me support for giving real evidence of my behavior.
- Don't dismiss the positivity. So much of the discussion about RfA is about toxicity and dysfunction, but before, during, and after my run I was the recipient of lots of praise and generosity; the former mostly from people I'd never interacted with. I don't think people fully appreciate how many others like to see candidates succeed, whether that's through helping them prepare or supporting them. It's nice. Be cautious about RfA, but don't be cynical.
- Be careful with sarcasm if you don't know the candidate. There were one or two occasions where my heart skipped a beat seeing a comment from someone I didn't know and being unsure whether it was scathing criticism or some light humor. Thankfully in all instances it was the latter, but I would tread lightly with jokey criticism if the candidate doesn't know you. For cardiac health, if nothing else...
- Some people have deranged takes on olives.
The next few points are more geared towards people thinking of running an RfA.
- Reading RfAs of people with similar candidate profiles is super useful. You'll see the types of questions you might be asked and be able to anticipate common concerns with candidates originating from similar parts of the wiki as you.
- Before you run, ask for an evaluation from someone whom you respect but don't know personally. I did this, and it was super insightful to get a different perspective on myself. I owe it to Sennecaster for the idea.
- Read RfA debriefs, recent RfAs, and RfAs by candidates of a similar profile to you (e.g. I read Spicy’s RfA closely). All the recent debriefs are worth reading, but I found HouseBlaster's particularly helpful. Speaking of: my RfA soundtrack was "Paradise" by Coldplay. Pretty apt, given that the music video is about escaping to a savanna.
- Wait for people you don't know super well to reach out to you. I found the Dunning-Kruger effect to be really strong regarding readiness for adminship, and so seeing how other people evaluate your chances is a good test of whether you're actually fit. Even if you think you're low profile, an RfA needs momentum in support to do well, and a nom offer from someone you don't know is a good bar to set for that kind of name recognition.
- On the flip side, if you're worried about declining nomination offers, it's okay. I declined 11.
Recognition
My RfA was the product of the public and private kindness of many people around me. This doesn't happen without them. So, a major thank you to:
- Kevin, for your incredibly kind nomination statement and unwavering advocacy for me. There's something I find deeply funny about the fact I was co-nominated by the guy who, five years ago, had to gave me three temporary grants of rollback before he trusted me with it indefinitely.
- Lee, for your steadying presence during the run and your thoughtful and personal nomination statement, which covered my profile in a way I was honored by.
- Blablubbs, for your invaluable advice and for giving me the confidence to finally approach my nominators.
- Sennecaster, for sharing your RfA experience with me without reservation (and listening to my unhinged ramblings when I was bored and sick).
- Leeky, for double-checking my assessed content work even after I declined your nom offer.
- GeneralNotability, for returning to support me after what you went through—I enjoyed plenty of kind words over that week, but your actions meant something special.
- PMC, for fighting with humor in the comments and keeping my head on straight.
- Someone who I did not ask for permission to publicly name, for sending me emotional support memes when I was sick. Laughter is medicine.
Of course, I'm also super grateful to my enforcers monitors ScottishFinnishRadish and Ganesha811, and to everyone who reached out publicly and privately with kind messages and support. It meant a lot.
RHaworth, TomCat4680 and PawełMM
A Wikipedia editor from Croydon, London, Roger Haworth began editing the English Wikipedia in January 2005, and was an administrator from August of that year until February 2020. As an admin, he mostly worked in new-page patrolling. When he was desysoped, according to the admin action stats at the time, he was ranked second overall for number of page deletions, sixth for undeletions, and fourth for protections. He died on 3 April 2024, aged 78.
TomCat4680 was a Wikipedian for just over eighteen years. He was often in the top 1000 Wikipedians by number of edits, where he appeared at the time of his passing, with 99,582 edits. TomCat4680 was involved in many articles and projects over the years. He helped update articles related to the Flint water crisis and COVID-19. Tom was born on Easter Sunday, April 6th, 1980 and died on Thanksgiving, November 28, 2024, at his home near Mount Morris, Michigan, after a brief illness. He is missed by family, friends, and his cat Paws that was at his side at the time of his passing.
Paweł Moszyński joined Wikipedia in August 2005. He became an administrator of the Polish Wikipedia in April 2011. Being born in 1940, he was one of the oldest editors and, for many years, its oldest sysop. Over almost 20 years, he has made more than 90,000 contributions to Wikimedia projects, as well as more than 90,000 mark-ups of pending changes. He was a member of the Wikimedia Poland Association since 2010. For years, he has been the most active contributor to the photography workshops on both Wikipedia and Commons, helping people make a wide range of photographic edits ranging from simple crops to full restorations. He was recognized for this work on the English Wikipedia as an Editor of the Week in October 2023. An engineer by education, he taught metrology at the Warsaw University of Technology for many years. Varsovian and active participant in local meetings in Warsaw, as well as national events. He passed away on 4 April 2025. He is missed by his wife, family, friends, and the Polish Wikimedia community.
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, off to report we go...
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- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by igordebraga, GN22, Shuipzv3, Vestrian24Bio, and CAWylie.
Adolescent resident (March 16 to 22)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Adolescence (TV series) |  |
2,641,901 |  |
This crime drama miniseries about a 13-year-old British schoolboy (Owen Cooper) who is arrested for stabbing a girl to death premiered on Netflix on March 13. Directed by Philip Barantini and written by #6 with Jack Thorne (pictured), all four of the series' episodes were filmed in a single shot. Barantini had previously used the one-shot technique in 2021 for his film Boiling Point, which also starred #6. The series has received critical acclaim, with the acting of its leads often being singled out for praise. |
| 2 | Sunita Williams |  |
1,949,331 |  |
On June 5, 2024, Williams and fellow astronaut Barry Wilmore launched on Boeing Crew Flight Test, the first crewed Boeing Starliner flight, to the International Space Station. Their stay on the ISS was scheduled for eight days, but helium leaks and thruster malfunctions with the Starliner led NASA to opt not to have the astronauts take the Starliner back to Earth. Williams and Wilmore stayed in space for more than nine months, until they returned to Earth safely abroad SpaceX Crew-9 on March 18. When they splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico which shall be known by no other name, they were greeted by some adorable dolphins. |
| 3 | George Foreman |  |
1,694,604 | .jpg) |
A boxer who died at the age of 76, with career highlights including an Olympic gold at the 1968 Summer Olympics, as well as the heavyweight world title in both the 1970s and the 1990s, in the former losing his belt in the famous Rumble in the Jungle against Muhammad Ali, and in the latter getting into shape thanks to a grill that he decided to endorse. A fun fact about Foreman is that all his 5 sons are named "George" — and one of his 7 daughters is Georgetta. |
| 4 | Snow White (2025 film) | |
1,089,675 | .jpg) |
Disney's live action remakes of its animated classics reached the original, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still an animation landmark nearly 90 years later. Some decisions were questioned before release, such as Rachel Zegler as the title princess (she was given an unflattering haircut, and many didn't find it believable that Gal Gadot is jealous of her looks) and making the dwarfs computer-generated. And now that it's out, even more plaint was made, of changes to the plot and a campy (if not embarrassing) musical number for the Evil Queen — so who knows if audiences will overlook all this and make Disney recoup a hefty $250 million budget and reach the break-even point of $500 million? |
| 5 | Severance (TV series) | |
966,198 |  |
This American science fiction psychological thriller Apple TV+ series released its season 2 finale on March 21. That same day, it was announced that the series was renewed for a third season with 25 questions that audience are awaiting to be answered in season 3. |
| 6 | Stephen Graham | |
926,848 | .png) |
One of the main actors and co-writer and creator of #1. This writer was first introduced to him in Snatch., and Graham has also been in Gangs of New York, Boardwalk Empire, This Is England, and two each of both the Pirates of the Caribbean and Venom movies. |
| 7 | Deaths in 2025 |  |
923,517 |  |
I am afraid that there's much to be afraid of Here today, gone tomorrow... |
| 8 | Saint Patrick's Day | |
906,375 |  |
March 17 was the day to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, be with accent imitations, drinking lots of beer, or using green everywhere. |
| 9 | The Electric State | |
746,614 | .jpg) |
In an alternate version of the 1990s that went through a robot war, Millie Bobby Brown goes to the desert where the machines were forced to live in exile in search of evidence that her supposedly deceased brother is still alive. Taking the setting of the eponymous graphic novel and elements from many sci-fi works like Fallout, Surrogates, Ready Player One and the Transformers movies, The Electric State received negative reviews for being as unremarkable as most Netflix original movies in spite of the most impressive visuals a staggering $320 million can buy. Audiences still checked it out, and it's the second most viewed Netflix movie of the year after Back in Action. |
| 10 | The White Lotus season 3 | |
734,821 | _01.jpg) |
The third season of the series released its sixth episode on HBO on March 23. HBO will continue to release a new episode every Sunday, until the season finale on April 6. |
Teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me (March 23 to 29)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Adolescence (TV series) | |
2,304,762 |  |
This British crime drama Netflix miniseries about a 13-year-old schoolboy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) who is arrested for the murder of a girl in his school; created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham; and directed by Philip Barantini (pictured); released all of its four episodes on March 13, which were each shot in one continuous take. It received critical acclaim for its directing, writing, and cinematography, with special attention paid to its atmosphere and performances — and it tops the report for a second consecutive week. |
| 2 | Snow White (2025 film) | |
1,941,073 | .jpg) |
Marc Webb directed the live-action adaptation of Disney's first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that wound up very expensive and is at a high risk of losing lots of money, as audiences were not as enthusiastic to see it for a multitude of things (being tired of those remakes, uninspiring previews that provided bad first impressions such as computer-generated dwarfs and Rachel Zegler's characterization, the movie's alleged wokisme, adapting an older movie compared to the Disney Renaissance remakes) and an underperforming $87 million worldwide opening[a] is set to suffer a steep downfall. |
| 3 | Natalia Grace | |
1,511,647 |  |
This was supposedly a real-life version of Orphan, an Eastern European child adopted by an American family who turned out to be a sociopathic adult woman with dwarfism. But some things weren't the same, as the parents of Ukrainian-born Natalia Grace petitioned the Marion County court to change her birth records and raise Grace's legal age from eight to twenty-two, subsequently leaving her alone in an apartment as they moved to Canada. According to the couple who found Grace struggling to survive and took her in, her behavior is not bad: the adoptive parents were eventually charged with neglect. This weird story is now being told in the Hulu limited series Good American Family. |
| 4 | Rachel Zegler | |
1,247,792 | .jpg) |
The protagonist of #2, who has already starred in a Best Picture nominee, fought alongside superheroes, and survived The Hunger Games. Already unpopular with some on the Internet, Zegler's reputation wasn't helped by her unfortunate quotes regarding the original Snow White. At least she'll take time off filmmaking to play Evita on West End. Disney allegedly put her on a blacklist and producer Marc Platt's son slammed her trying to bring politics into the film on Twitter (namely following a thank you regarding the trailer receiving millions of views with "and always remember, free Palestine"; yes, it's a stretch). |
| 5 | Joe Gatto | |
1,024,048 | _(cropped).jpg) |
This American improvisational comedian, actor, and producer was accused by two women of sexually inappropriate behavior, which he has denied. Regardless, he cancelled his comedy tour and checked into a facility. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2025 | |
976,076 | .jpg) |
To quote the villain of #2: "Dip the apple in the brew. Let the Sleeping Death seep through. Look, on the skin! The symbol of what lies within. Now turn red to tempt Snow White to make her hunger for a bite. HAVE A BITE!" |
| 7 | Vanessa Trump | |
975,690 | .jpg) |
The ex-wife of Donald Trump Jr. and mother of his five children has been revealed as the latest girlfriend of Tiger Woods. |
| 8 | Good American Family | |
868,835 |  |
A Hulu limited series dramatizing the story of #3, it stars Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia Grace, and Mark Duplass and Ellen Pompeo (pictured) as the Barnett couple that adopted her. |
| 9 | Severance (TV series) | |
849,542 | .jpg) |
This science fiction psychological thriller Apple TV+ series had its season 2 finale which concluded with a cliffhanger; has been renewed for a season 3 on the same day as finale. Ben Stiller (pictured) who executive produced and primarily directed the series revealed that the third season won't take as long as the second season did, as the second season's production was heavily delayed due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes. |
| 10 | L2: Empuraan | |
842,761 |  |
This Mollywood action thriller film, a sequel to the 2019 film Lucifer and the second instalment in the Lucifer trilogy was released on March 27 and managed to recover its budget of ₹180 crore (US$21 million) in just 4 days and emerged as the second highest-grossing Malayalam film of all time and the third highest-grossing Indian film of 2025. It was jointly produced by Aashirvad Cinemas, Lyca Productions, and Sree Gokulam Movies, with Mohanlal (pictured) reprising his role as the lead character. |
And you're turning tricks, with your crucifix, you're a star (March 30 to April 5)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Val Kilmer |
|
5,517,198 | 
|
A talented actor who was the youngest person admitted into Juilliard School, started his film career with the leading role in Top Secret! and emassed hits (Top Gun, Batman Forever, Heat) and acclaimed performances (The Doors, Tombstone, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) even with a few flops and a reputation of being difficult to work with. His last film appearance on Top Gun: Maverick displayed Kilmer's biggest setback in life, a throat cancer that took his voice (in the documentary Val, he speaks with much effort covering a tracheotomy hole in his neck), and another respiratory issue caused his death as Kilmer died at 65 of a pneumonia. |
| 2 | Sikandar (2025 film) |
|
1,865,547 | 
|
Bollywood's latest hit, in spite of negative reviews, has Salman Khan as a Raja hunted by a politician seeking revenge. |
| 3 | Adolescence (TV series) |
|
1,396,824 | 
|
This British crime drama Netflix miniseries about a 13-year-old schoolboy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) who is arrested for the murder of a girl in his school released all of its four episodes on March 13, which were each shot in one continuous take. It received critical acclaim for its directing, writing, and cinematography, with special attention paid to its atmosphere and performances. |
| 4 | ChatGPT |
|
1,174,872 | 
|
Even those who never watched an anime in their lives were seeing online people using ChatGPT to turn images into pastiches of Studio Ghibli, whose catalogue includes two Oscar winners (Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron) and other acclaimed movies such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo. |
| 5 | Richard Chamberlain |
|
1,090,281 | 
|
One year after the acclaimed new adaptation of Shōgun, death came at the age of 90 for the star of the original one, known as "King of the Miniseries" for limited shows like that one and The Thorn Birds. Other notable roles for Chamberlain included Aramis in a trilogy of The Three Musketeers adaptations, Allan Quatermain in two movies heavily influenced by Indiana Jones, and the first portrayal of Jason Bourne. |
| 6 | A Minecraft Movie |
|
1,082,403 | 
|
Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, and formed the basis of the third video game adaptation starring Jack Black, whose reception is halfway between the hated Borderlands and the beloved The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Reviewers were unimpressed, as in spite of Black and Jason Momoa enjoying themselves, critics envisaged that only children and long-time players could properly like A Minecraft Movie. With those two demographics attending the movie en masse, it opened to a massive opening weekend of $300 million worldwide. |
| 7 | Deaths in 2025 |
|
1,018,476 | 
|
From #1's last movie: To tell me you need me, I see that you're bleeding You don't need to show me again But if you decide to, I'll ride in this life with you I won't let go 'til the end... |
| 8 | Joanne Whalley |
|
942,756 | 
|
#1's longest relationship was with this actress, who he met when they worked on Willow and is the mother of his two children, Mercedes and Jack (pictured). Their divorce affected Kilmer while making the infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau, where his on-set behavior let director John Frankenheimer to declare "There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There is not enough money in the world." |
| 9 | L2: Empuraan |
|
926,960 | 
|
This Mollywood action thriller film, a sequel to the 2019 film Lucifer and the second instalment in the Lucifer trilogy was released on March 27 and managed to recover its budget of ₹180 crore (US$21 million) in just 4 days and break several records. It was jointly produced by Aashirvad Cinemas, Lyca Productions, and Sree Gokulam Movies, with Mohanlal reprising his role as the lead character. |
| 10 | Snow White (2025 film) |
|
897,714 | .jpg)
|
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is widely considered one of the best animations ever made. Its live-action remake is nowhere near as acclaimed, and in fact seems to attract overblown hatred — the review bombing on IMDb made it the lowest rated movie ever until the website decided to disconsider the hundreds of thousands of low grades. An awful thing that doesn't end also plays a role, as the film's Snow White is unpopular for among other things having spoken in favor of Palestine, and the Evil Queen is downright demonized simply because she is Israeli. In any case, audiences aren't watching Snow White, and a damning demonstration is how in its third weekend the film was surpassed not only by #6 and A Working Man but by some theatrically released episodes of The Chosen! |
Footnotes
- ^ The worldwide take is $168.4 million as The Signpost goes to press more than two weeks after US opening. Given the quarter billion dollar budget, this is probably pleasing nobody at Disney, even though it's not that close to Mars Needs Moms flop territory - ed.
Exclusions
- 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.
Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
- This article originally appeared on Diff on March 27, 2025. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. See related articles in this issue at Op-ed, In focus, and Opinion.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently highlighted the extensive research effort that goes into identifying global trends that are critical to our priorities as a movement, a planning exercise we have undertaken annually since 2022. We examine rapidly shifting changes to ask more deeply: “What does the world need from Wikimedia now?”
These trends then drive meaningful conversations on-wiki and in many community spaces to help prioritize actions and investments.
This year, one trend that has generated significant conversation within and beyond the Wikimedia movement relates to neutrality: how trust in information online is declining and a fragmentation of consensus about what information is true. Some believe that the world has become more complex, and people are more divided than ever. As threats to neutrality appear to be on the rise globally, Wikipedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy is needed now more than ever. This core principle has served Wikipedia extremely well, and has become even stronger over nearly a quarter century of volunteer contributions.
How this principle of neutrality translates into NPOV policy varies across the Wikimedia projects, highlighting an opportunity for communities to learn from each other; and to explore whether common global standards for neutrality can better protect the projects (and volunteers) in an environment of expanded threats and growing regulation.
To support the Wikimedia communities and reaffirm our commitment to neutrality, the Wikimedia Foundation will convene a working group of active editors, Trustees, researchers, and advisors to explore recommendations for common standards for NPOV policies that can protect Wikipedia, increase the integrity of the projects, and equip the volunteers trusted to administer these policies with more support.
These conversations will be grounded in the foundational principles underlying NPOV, designed to present a fair, neutral description of the facts without compromising the exploration of ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Reaffirming Wikipedia’s neutrality in response to what we are seeing in the world makes this highly trusted resource even more resilient in its mission to serve accurate, reliable information.
Read on for more information about Wikipedia’s NPOV policies and how to contribute.
A brief history of Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
From the beginning of the project, maintaining a neutral point of view has been a core principle of Wikipedia. The Meta-Wiki page, started in 2003, notes that Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are "best served not by advancing or detracting from particular points of view on any given subject, but by trying to present a fair, neutral description of the facts – including that various interpretations and points of view exist…This policy exists on all languages of projects that have adopted it, but the details of the policy vary significantly between projects and between different languages in those projects."
Wikipedians have understood this non-negotiable principle requires collaboration in how it is applied in practice: "While NPOV is an ultimate goal in writing an article, it is difficult to achieve immediately as a single writer. It is thus sometimes regarded as an iterative process (as is wiki writing in general), by which opposing viewpoints compromise on language and presentation to produce a neutral description acceptable to all, according to consensus decision-making."
Like all policies, NPOV has been refined over Wikipedia’s 24 years with thousands of inputs across hundreds of languages. Throughout this evolutionary process of community discussion, the neutral point of view principle and its application remains fundamental to the Wikipedia model.
Common global standards for NPOV policies
A cursory review of NPOV policies across different language versions of Wikipedia at a recent community workshop revealed variations, inconsistencies, and many opportunities for the different Wikimedia projects to learn from each other. Editors with extended rights, those trusted by their communities with administering NPOV policies, described the challenges they face when these policies are unclear or underdeveloped in some languages.
As public trust in news sources declines, Wikipedians face evolving challenges in representing views from reliable sources fairly, proportionately, and without editorial bias. This application is often tested when editors cover fast-moving and contentious topics. In recent years, this has ranged from geopolitical conflicts like Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine to issues of special attention like the unbalanced representation of women on the Wikimedia projects, increasing content about the Global South from those who live there, representing medical information about pandemics, to how Wikipedia takes action to enforce its policies when there are concerns of antisemitism. We have seen in some of these cases that reasonable concerns take time and research to address.
As volunteers know well, Wikipedia’s integrity – especially on evolving and contentious topics – is safeguarded by robust community governance processes (e.g., discussion protocols, oversight mechanisms, dispute resolution channels) that prioritize a fair and balanced approach. These well-documented standards are specifically designed to prevent undue influence and preserve an independent, nonprofit model that exists nowhere else at this scale. We have seen time and time again that volunteers have a strong track record of successfully managing neutrality on contentious subjects.
Those that sustain the Wikimedia projects remain humble and clear-eyed: they must constantly adapt and improve their systems as digital and media platforms around the world struggle with bias and disinformation. Stronger community-led content moderation policies that are enforced primarily by local communities protect Wikipedia and Wikipedians alike.
To support these essential self-governance mechanisms, this working group will ask how more common standards for NPOV policies between projects can protect and improve Wikipedia and support volunteers, building on the careful consideration that developed NPOV policies over the past two decades. The intent of the working group will be to facilitate knowledge sharing about community-led policies that have made Wikipedia a highly trusted resource around the world. This will incorporate feedback from work already underway to establish policies and that reflects values shared by the global Wikimedia community.
An initial set of recommendations will be presented to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees at their June 2025 meeting, alongside approval of the Foundation’s plan and budget.
Contributions are welcomed by all who care about these topics within and beyond the Wikimedia movement, on the dedicated Meta-Wiki page or as part of the Foundation’s annual planning conversations.
The world’s reliance on Wikipedia continues to grow – from AI chatbots to search engines to voice assistants to content reusers across the internet. At a time when we are used (and needed!) more than ever, we must reinforce our core principles and sustain our shared values. Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutrality will make it even more trusted to deliver the content that billions of people rely on around the world.
Thirteen
"Man, even for me, browsing rejected drafts is kind of depressing."