Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-10-20/In the media

In the media

An incident at WikiConference North America; WMF reports AI-related traffic drop and explains Wikipedia to US conservatives

By Bri, Smallbones, HaeB, and Jonatan Svensson Glad

Gunman incident interrupts WikiConference North America

Civic Hall at Union Square, New York, where The New York Times reported that the incident occurred

An apparent suicide attempt involving a revolver occurred at WikiConference North America just before 10:30 a.m. local time Friday, October 17, in New York. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. NBC News' headline reads "Armed man wearing 'non-offending pedophile' sign storms stage at NYC Wikipedia conference", and adds "The man pointed a gun at the ceiling and threatened to kill himself before being tackled by conference organizers, according to police."

The New York Times ("Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference") highlighted the actions of two Wikipedians that it said are on the event's "trust and safety team": Richard Knipel (User:Pharos), who "grabbed the gunman from behind", and Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado), who charged forward and pried the loaded gun from the man's hand. While cautioning that the gunman's motivations remained "murky", the NYT reports that "he was wearing a sign around his neck that said 'anti-contact non-offending pedophile' and he told the audience he was going to die by suicide to protest what he called Wikipedia’s 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on pedophiles," possibly referring to "a rule that editors 'who identify themselves as pedophiles will be blocked and banned indefinitely.'"

The Wikimedia Foundation issued the following statement to The Signpost:

Earlier today, a conference attendee entered the WikiConference North America event with a gun and approached the stage, announcing an apparent suicide attempt. They were detained quickly and taken into custody by law enforcement.
Participants at WikiConference North America are safe, and we appreciate the conference organizers and attendees who stepped in to help during the opening ceremony. The rest of today's program is cancelled, and there will be additional security as well as law enforcement onsite for the remainder of the event.
We are grateful to the event organizers and local law enforcement for their support.

Two years ago, the 2023 edition of WCNA in Toronto had been interrupted by a bomb threat (see prior Signpost coverage). – S, B, H

Sanger's accusations of left-wing bias reverberate among US conservatives

A letter from the U.S. Senate to Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz's letter demanding information on "left-wing bias", anti-Semitism, and the source of reliable sources/perennial sources list, specifically (page 4, demand 5)

Following Larry Sanger's publication of a long document calling for reforms of Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: "Larry Sanger is 'baaaaack!' with 'Nine Theses on Wikipedia'"), several media covered accusations of "left wing bias" on Wikipedia by Sanger and other critics. It appears to have culminated for now in a letter from the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to the Wikimedia CEO demanding information, following which more media sources reported on the issuance of the letter, and the committee's investigation.

Why Conservatives Are Attacking 'Wokepedia' in The Wall Street Journal gives an overall balanced view of why conservatives don't like this encyclopedia, or at least names some of those who don't like it the most: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Larry Sanger. It then puts the current anti-Wikipedia campaign into the context that "the nation’s most august institutions are under pressure for the messages they put into the world." Jimmy Wales then gives the arguments in favor of Wikipedia.
Conservatives Slam Wikipedia as 'Woke' And Its Own Co-Founder Agrees: 'It's Been Hijacked by the Left' in the International Business Times cites the WSJ article and then veers in a more conservative direction.
The speech wars come for Wikipedia in Politico concentrates on free speech issues and even cites a Village pump discussion.
Cruz presses Wikipedia on bias amid growing conservative criticism in The Hill Sen. Ted Cruz had questions about the WP:RSPS list, in a letter to Maryana Iskander
Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias in Ars Technica explains what the U.S. Senate committee headed by Ted Cruz is looking for and followed with a second article titled "Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says" featuring WMF's associate general counsel Jacob Rogers, who says "a lot of what's in this [Sen. Cruz] letter is actually misunderstandings". Rogers (who, as noted by Ars, had himself worked on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations before joining WMF in 2014), explained that "There’s no formal authority behind this letter. It’s just a letter from a person in the legislative branch who cares about the topic, so there is nothing compelling us to give him anything. I think we are probably going to answer the letter, but there’s no sort of legal requirement to actually fully provide everything that answers every question."
"Wikipedia editors claim that Trump's 'actions against civil society were described by hundreds of legal experts and political scientists as authoritarian.' ... Wikipedia provides just three sources to back up this sweeping claim." Fox News, via AOL confirmed in current revision as of writing -ed.
Western Journal noted its own blacklisting, blackballing, listing as generally unreliable, or whatever you call it (it was "blackball" in their headline) (paywalled)

Other media that reported or commented on this issue included JNS and The Washington Examiner.

On October 10, the Wikimedia Foundation reacted to "growing media and other attention around Wikipedia and how it works" by publishing an explainer on topics such as the NPOV policy and (the English Wikipedia's) perennial sources list ("This is not a comprehensive list of Wikipedia’s sources, nor is it a comparison or evaluation of reliability between sources").

The Congressional inquiry and Larry Sanger's interview by The Daily Signal (which we are prohibited from linking) are subjects of reflection by Jimmy Wales in his interview with The New York Times (see below). – B, H

Elon Musk announces AI-based "Grokipedia" to challenge Wikipedia

Announcement

This robot is scheduled to replace all the readers of this newsletter. Or maybe not.

As already reported in our previous issue, on September 30 Elon Musk announced that at his company xAI, "We are building Grokipedia [..] Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia", following up on earlier comments about possibly using the company's Grok chatbot to "rewrite Wikipedia to remove falsehoods and add missing context".

Livemint stressed that the Grok chatbot has had a few problems:
"Grok AI had answered a user's question on 'Who are the 3 people doing most harm to America right now?' by naming Musk along with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Meanwhile, the chatbot had also gone into a Hitler-praising spree on X shortly after it received the Grok 4 update. It also went on to cite Hitler as its surname in response to questions by multiple users."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says Wikipedia’s AI rival Grokipedia will launch in 2 weeks: Here’s what to expect The Times of India relies on posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) that seem to tell Musk what the posters expect from Grokipedia. Clear official statements from Musk or his subordinates are rare. One poster writes that Grokipedia "will cut through the BS" and that it "will use first principles and physics as a basis to identify facts and counter distortion. This would mean moving beyond surface-level edits to provide complete and accurate explanations."
Elon Musk announces 'Grokipedia' challenge to Wikipedia on UPI followed livemint is emphasizing some of the problems with the Grok chatbot. It also stated that David O. Sacks had suggested the new encyclopedia to Musk.
Elon Musk announces 'Grokipedia' challenge to Wikipedia in The Hill stresses that Musk and Sacks want to create Grokipedia due to the purported deficiencies of Wikipedia.
Elon Musk Plans to Take on Wikipedia With 'Grokipedia' in PC Magazine focuses on Musk's antipathy to Wikipedia. A second PC Mag story says "xAI posted a job listing for a 'Member of Technical Staff, Grokipedia – Search/Retrieval.' The job posting suggests Grokipedia will leverage AI to pull information from Grok’s training database to create the encyclopedia entries."

On October 18, Musk followed up by announcing that a

"Buggy beta version of Grokipedia V0.1 will be released on Monday [October 20].
Even this very early release is better on average than Wikipedia imo."

Echoing an earlier focus on male genitalia in his criticism of Wikipedia, Musk added: "And we will offer you the opportunity to donate $5 to send a Grok dick pic to Jimmy Wales."

Reactions

Joseph Reagle in 2019. credit Reagle, CC-BY-SA 4.0

“

The [Wikipedia] website has been around for a while and therefore enjoys significant network effects among contributors (who want to dedicate themselves to one website and system) and momentum among end users (people and services).

”

— Joseph Reagle, Northeastern University, Northeastern News

Uphill battle against incumbent: A piece by the Northeastern University Communications Team features Joseph Reagle, a professor in the field of communications, noting that Wikipedia is "the last of the early generation websites that still serves the users instead of extracting value from them via advertising and algorithmic manipulation". Reagle is the author of a 2010 book about Wikipedia (Good Faith Collaboration) and the co-editor of Wikipedia @ 20.
Does it really fix the issue?: "Elon Musk is right that Wikipedia is biased, but his AI alternative will be the same at best", according to an article in The Conversation by Taha Yasseri, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, Director of a TCD-TU Dublin joint centre for Sociology of Humans and Machines, and author of various research publications about Wikipedia. He concludes "In an age increasingly shaped by misinformation, transparency, diversity and open debate are still our best tools for approaching truth."

Prior art

Musk is not the first to explore using Al for generating Wikipedia-like articles.

A small website called WikiGen.ai (one developer's side project) already offers "automatically create[d] comprehensive articles on any topic you can imagine. Unlike traditional wikis that require human editors, our Al instantly generates well-structured, informative content tailored to your preferred reading level".
"Botipedia", a project by INSEAD professor Philip M. Parker (which has been under development since at least 2021 and moved to an LLM-based approach more recently), reacted to Musk's September announcement by asserting that it had already launched version 0.5 of its "truth-seeking Al with 400B+ articles, 6,000x bigger than Wikipedia" (although a later tweet clarified it will only be "Open to all in 2026. For now, limited to edu/org/corp emails while we scale"). Larry Sanger praised it as "one of the most interesting new competitors of Wikipedia". A promotional video portrays Botipedia as being superior to Wikipedia due to its inclusionism and language diversity: "No subject, event, language or geography is too obscure to merit an article, meaning that no language gets left behind."
The task of using LLMs to write Wikipedia-like articles has been the object of numerous academic research efforts for years (see e.g. our 2024 coverage of "STORM", a particularly notable project out of Stanford University that has also seen considerable real-life usage).
Lastly, like Wikipedia itself, Grokipedia could also be seen as competing with ChatGPT Deep Research and similar offerings by OpenAl's competitors (like Gemini Deep Research) that generate cited reports on a user-specified topic.

– S, B, H

Wikimedia Foundation reports 8% traffic drop since last year due to "the impact of generative AI and social media"

404 Media ("Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors"), Livemint ("Wikipedia loses 8% of human traffic as generative AI and social platforms change user habits") and others highlight a concerning statement from a recent Wikimedia Foundation post titled "New User Trends on Wikipedia."

In it, the WMF's Marshall Miller discusses a bug (phab:T395934, discovered in June and fixed earlier this month) regarding the failure of the Foundation's web analytics systems to detect a large amount of bot traffic, starting around May 2025. (Among other disruptions, including rendering pageview tools unreliable that are used by many editors, this also meant that the Foundation's own monthly Movement Metrics reports had to pause their regular analysis of readership trends, starting with the May 2025 issue.) With the data corrections now applied and backfilled, a drop in human pageviews (even when accounting for yearly seasonality) became apparent:

Revising our data in this way means we have to interpret it with care, as our bot detection systems apply different rules at different points in time. But after making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.

This will not come a surprise to many Wikipedians and other observers who have been wondering about the impact of the current AI boom on Wikipedia ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Still, the Foundation's post doesn't provide any detail on how it was able to causally attribute the decline to these two factors (GenAI and social media), or how much each of them contributed to the measured 8%. Several academic research publications – including one co-authored by a Nobel Prize winner – have already tried to detect and quantify a ChatGPT-caused drop in Wikipedia traffic for earlier timespans, with varying results, see e.g. our overview in the March 22 Signpost issue: "So again, what has the impact of ChatGPT really been?". Hopefully WMF will likewise release the statistical analysis underlying its new answer to one of the most pressing questions about Wikipedia and AI. – H

Board elections

"Wikimedia Foundation removes anti-Israel board hopeful from ballot" (Jewish News Syndicate [JNS])
Inside Wikipedia’s Board Elections Stephen Harrison interviews a former candidate.
A banned user published a full write-up of the situation around the slate of candidates in Breitbart News, which is also a blacklisted site on English Wikipedia. The Breitbart write-up also mentions internal Signpost discussions, making it difficult for us to report on for multiple reasons.

– B

In brief

Cory Doctorow in 2016, public domain by Internet Archive

Cory Doctorow explains why Wikipedia works: Cory Doctorow devoted a recent issue of his "Pluralistic" blog to explaining a recent "Why Wikipedia works", covering various historical aspects as well as reviewing recent media, notably "Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge," and Wikipedian Molly White who "shows you how to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge".
Not a mystery person anymore: "Meet the mystery editor behind most of the Wikipedia pages on Korea" (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
Digitize or Disappear: Akwa Ibom State deserves a place in Wikipedia, writes News Ghana.
Who am I, anyway?: Aftonbladet reports that former Swedish national hockey coach Rikard Grönborg appeared uncertain about his future with Sweden's Tre Kronor team, joking that he had "actually checked Wikipedia" to see what his current title was. The comment came amid speculation about his position following recent coaching changes.
Flattery will get you everywhere: An opinion piece (paywalled) in WAtoday says "[It's] the best thing that has happened to humanity since penicillin...In a world of online junk, Wikipedia is a source of hope."
Are you motivated by all that sweet, sweet AI attribution?: A piece at IBM's "Think" blog says that WMF did the Wikimedia Enterprise model (see prior Signpost coverage 1, 2) because "Attribution is a key motivator for [Wikipedia] editors, and the [Wikimedia] Foundation sees proper sourcing as essential to its mission. Making sure LLMs credit Wikipedia for their information is an essential step."
Jimbo to speak at UN...: No, Jimmy Wales will not address the General Assembly, but he will speak at the Goals Lounge in the UN Headquarters about his new book "The Seven Rules of Trust" at 1 p.m. Wednesday October 29.
...and spoke to The New York Times: Read the interview here or view the video on YouTube (43 minutes). This is classic Jimbo, speaking about current challenges, in detail and at length. Among other topics, he was asked about Elon Musk's attacks on Wikipedia, and also revealed that "we've had various conversations over the years. He texts me sometimes, I text him sometimes. He's much more respectful and quiet in private, but that you would expect. He's got a big public persona." Pressed by the interviewer about the possibility of Musk "draining support for Wikipedia", Wales replied that "I don't think he has the power he thinks he has – or that a lot of people think he has – to damage Wikipedia. I mean, we'll be here in a hundred years and he won't."
Slop tells feted: Grant St. Clair writes "Wikipedia publishes list of AI writing tells" in BoingBoing (a regrettable omission from August when this was published – but we did cover another take on AI slop in our earlier October edition).

Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.

← Previous "In the media"

Next "In the media" →

In this issue

20 October 2025 (all comments)

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Wikiconference incident

Richard and Andrew deserve Wikimedian of the Year for their heroism. - ZLEA ^TǀC 22:52, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Make that "Wikipedians of the decade" Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:09, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  - Agreed. Amazing work, y'all. I'm glad everyone's safe. Silver seren^C 23:21, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. At the very least they deserve some special recognition. Pencilceaser123 (talk) 02:10, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For readers, there is an open letter to thank the two: Wikipedia:Thank you to Fuzheado and Pharos. Feel free to affix your signatures to it to express your appreciation. – robertsky (talk) 03:45, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This was a scary incident for those of us in the room, and I am enormously grateful that Richard and Andrew stepped up. From the audience, there was no hesitation from either of them, and they exhibited incredible bravery. I am also grateful that the man was not able to harm himself and I hope he is able to get the help and support he needs (which I highly doubt he would get from the criminal justice system. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)^{Talk to Me!} 12:12, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"An apparent suicide attempt involving a revolver occurred at WikiConference North America just before 10:30 a.m. local time Friday in New York." DATE please!!!! Well done the Wiki-heros! Johnbod (talk) 14:11, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Last Friday, October 17, 2025. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:30, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  - Are you going to add to the article? Johnbod (talk) 14:33, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    - It's Wikipedia. You can fix it yourself! – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:46, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a myself big fan of MOS:DATED and {{when}} in general. But it seems that some folks are unaware that unlike mainspace articles, Signpost stories (like most news publications) carry a specific publication date, which is displayed in big font on top of the page (above the headline). Anyway, no objection to Jonesey95's edit if it helps those who are less fluent in reading news articles.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:04, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with closeted pedophiles editing Wikipedia is not new. Without further comment, I'll note that WP:CHILDPRO was started in 2010, and the edits to that page can give clues to the extent and scope of the problem. Jclemens (talk) 21:55, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Editors may want to read WP:Village pump (WMF) § Statement from SFR on the incident at WCNA from ScottishFinnishRadish, which provides relevant background and raises some serious issues. FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:57, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Grokipedia

An update that we missed right before publication: Musk announced announced today that the Grokipedia v0.1 launch planned for today had been postponed to "to end of week. We need to do more work to purge out the propaganda." (That's even though XAI engineers had apparently slept in tents in the office overnight to make the deadline, and Musk made coffee for them in the morning.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:59, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What does Musk think he's doing? The Master of Hedgehogs (talk) (contributions) (Sign my guestbook!) 12:42, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Getting himself in the news. Anomie⚔ 13:52, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Fair, fair. Well, he IS in the news, but, you can't seriously try to take down Wikipedia using AI. Well, that's just my three cents. rimshot The Master of Hedgehogs (talk) (contributions) (Sign my guestbook!) 14:07, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As a conservative, there is no way I would be using this Grokipedia. We knew very well that AI is not to be trusted. If the world is saying that Wikipedia which is written by human editors and checked multiple times by other human editors is not to be trusted, why should we trust an encyclopedia that is written by AI? And the AI owner itself has shown clear biases? I am quite sure Grokipedia will be forking from Wikipedia. The AI Grokipedia is touting will likely just rewrite articles from Wikipedia and call it theirs. ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 01:45, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I miss the days when Wikipedia was considered the sketchy website one uses with extreme diligence. AI and social media has moved the expectation of reliability to Wikipedia's level. However, while we are not actually sketchy and have also improved greatly since the mid-2000s, it is extremely unnerving to see people unquestionably accept AI like this. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 15:12, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@HaeB, The Master of Hedgehogs, Anomie, SunDawn, and Quxyz:

It's live now if someone wants to test it: https://grokipedia.com.

Bland (being drier than wikispeak is something) incompetent (reddit sourcing!) and unappealing as an encyclopedia. This goes for the Stanford project and the other LLM encyclopedia listed above as well. These may work for quick reference facts but for indepth reads I don't see it for now. Gotitbro (talk) 16:09, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So I compare Sam Ratulangi International Airport to Grokipedia's equal. I intentionally choose an article that is short so I can compare it better. It seems like Grokipedia is hoovering up all pieces of information from the Internet without thinking whether it is important or not. For instance, it writes a whole section about its "safety" which is not important for most readers as it is quite standard. It writes a whole section about "ground handling" that is basically just saying that the airport is following the international standards, which is not needed by most readers. They even got a large section about "environment considerations", despite the airport itself didn't have much notable characteristics about environmental issues. It is obvious that all airports will be noisy and polluting and Grok wrote a whole section about that is unbelievable (I thought Musk is not pro-environment)?

Design is very lacklustre. On the other hand, I do think Musk had commanded his staffs not to read from Wikipedia as it may impugn on his honor or something. And he has taken on himself not to take the free pictures from Commons as it will hurt his image as someone who is standing against Wikipedia. Any casual reader won't be interested on this site. ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 00:44, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
They have many articles that have an attribution to Wikipeida at the bottom.

When I first tried the domain it looked like wikipeida.org - the multi-lingual interface. I searched for Whittington's Longhouse, and it took me to a Twitter article about Dick Whittington, which mentioned the Longhouse. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 08:55, 31 October 2025 (UTC).[reply]

I have been looking around at articles about Dubuque, Iowa and they are so ungodly long. The Field of Dreams has 94 citations. Its enwiki equivalent has 19 citations. Could the enwiki equivalent be expanded? Sure. However, I feel like it just slurped up every single news story in the past forty years about the field and regurgitated it onto an article. I can't really tell though because no sane human is reading 94 citations of AI slop on a field in the middle of nowhere Iowa. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, yeah, Elon Musk needs to steal from Commons because there are zero features or even Wikilinks (Grokilinks?). ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 18:42, 1 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Daily Signal

Since when are we prohibited from linking to The Daily Signal? If there's an interview there of course we should link to it. The list of reliable sources (a) obviously doesn't apply to the Signpost newsletter because it's not a mainspace WP page and (b) doesn't apply to factual information (in this case that LS was interviewed in the Daily Signal). It'd be nice if signpost accurately portrayed the reality of the contentious issue of the list rather than repeating nonsense about it. JMWt (talk) 16:42, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

March 2025, WP:HERITAGEFOUNDATION was linked in the text above (that's part of WP:RSPS) The problem was that they threatened to dox our editors and links on Wikipedia were one of the proposed ways that they'd do it. See also Wikipedia:Requests for comment/The Heritage Foundation for a long discussion on this. The Daily Signal was considered part of the whole, which included threats of doxing The issue probably came us when a link in the drafts of this page, failed to link to the page. Given the safety issue there's no reason to mess with a link. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:50, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Smallbones: Am I in trouble if I have clicked a link to their website from any of our Wikimedia projects?! Gotitbro (talk) 15:53, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If I understand correctly, unless you were specifically targeted with a message on your talk page, you should be fine. However, I would still just be generally suspicious as a principal of cybersecurity. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 15:58, 29 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Explore Wikipedia history by browsing The Signpost archives.

Home

About