Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2026-06-21. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Comix: Take your turn (596 bytes · 💬)

• I'm looking forward to the next edit wars over whether someone swam or had swum to their imminent fate, and whether that would be a fait accompli. ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 11:20, 21 June 2026 (UTC)
• Glad I´m not the only one to notice this.Roundtheworld (talk) 08:59, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Community view: Putting the Wish into the Wishlist (2,987 bytes · 💬)

I'm rather surprised that this article from Barkeep has not generated any reader comments. Maybe it's because all the regular readers of The Signpost are already, like me, all too familiar with the issues it discusses and exposes:

The Foundation ignoring the community carries its own risks of course, as has been documented repeatedly throughout our history. Ignoring the community in a process explicitly about partnership between the community and the Foundation really is a new kind of failure. It suggests that there is no actual commitment to meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools... for improved support for moderation tools, bots, and the other features that help the Wikimedia projects succeed.

This isn't just about the WishList, as I wrote in reaction to the News & Notes column in this month's issue: The Wikimedia Foundation works with communities on solutions to change this trend (WMF announcement); where is the evidence of this other than deeply buried discussions with a few selectively appointed representatives of minor affiliates? Too often, experienced editors' warnings about reader and contributor behaviour are overridden by the WMF’s assumptions about what users ought to want. The result is predictable: features are built, volunteers explain why they will fail, they fail, and only then are they reconsidered.

The issue is not programming ability but organisational culture; volunteers with experience in UX and UI design who build and maintain the encyclopaedia have repeatedly warned that these changes would create unnecessary barriers, yet those concerns have largely been dismissed. Fifteen years ago, it was still possible for experienced volunteers to discuss these issues directly with the Foundation's technical leaderships and influence the outcome. As the organisation has grown, that dialogue has largely disappeared and until the political and cultural divide between the Foundation and its volunteer communities is addressed and the Foundation learns to treat its volunteer communities as a source of expertise rather than simply a constituency to be consulted, I see little reason to expect meaningful change for potential new users any time soon.

Not only does the WMF conveniently ignore the concerns and requests from the community, one gets the impression it fights tooth and nail to avoid and reject the advice and solutions the experts among the volunteers offer them. Thank you again Barkeep,for this exposé, it's just a shame that nowadays the WMF doesn't care two hoots what we write in The Signpost and has grown immune to any criticism from anywhere.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:32, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Disinformation report: PR for the people? (3,843 bytes · 💬)

Thanks for taking the time to do this research. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:39, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the article. PR is not neutral information, neutral info is not PR. Wikipedians will always remove PR where they find it. It just doesn’t fit. I don’t see any stable working model for these PR companies that would not involve hiding & deception. —MBq (talk) 04:01, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

@John Broughton and MBq:: Thank you for reading this! I realize that this is not my usual Disinformation report. They are usually about something somebody did, e.g. what did the Russian oligarchs do? or what did OceanGate do? This one seems to be about what some of the biggest and best-known PR agencies do after they had a big PR coup - announcing that they would follow Wikipedia's rules before Wikipedia announced the new rules! So, it seems from what I could find that they did - it was not much! They really couldn't handle the responsibility and often farmed out the actual requested edits to another PR firm. If this is what the big firms do, how much actual information can we expect to get from the smaller, less known PR firms, who are not in the spotlight and haven't made promises to the public and to Wikipedians? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 11:55, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

MBq, I think that PR work is broader than that. Editors should not remove factual changes just because the PR company provided information so we can correct our outdated or erroneous claims. Wikipedia articles should have up-to-date information about (e.g.) the number of employees, the name of the CEO, the new logo, etc. If a PR person is how we get what we want, then that's fine. We wanted that information anyway. What we don't want is bad content (e.g., "Bob's Big Business, Inc. is the best widget manufacturer in the world" or "We leverage the synergies to optimize our strategic roadmap while pivoting towards innovative solutions with a dynamic paradigm"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

I believe that our current approach to paid editing is suboptimal. We have a policy on paid editing but those who follow it are often penalised - at least in the short term. If a paid editor requests an edit as stipulated by the policy it enters a backlog and can sit there for weeks/months. On the other hand, if they just edit an article, chances are no one would notice. Alaexis_¿question? 11:29, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

The mentioning of TimTempleton in the Omnicom section is confusing. It was my understanding that they were not connected to Omnicom. Based off interactions I had with them (including amongst many others, the Ogilvy talk page) they always presented themselves as reviewer of COI edit requests rather than requestor. The only WP:COIDISCLOSE I knew of from them was that placed eight and a half years ago on the talk page of their father Robert Templeton.  Spintendo  12:57, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

From the editors: Ways for beginners to support The Signpost community journalism (3,437 bytes · 💬)

As a longtime regular contributor to the Signpost myself (and former editor-in-chief), I second the invitation to contribute to the Signpost in genera;, and most of these are great suggestions.

However, readers should be aware that the three users who present themselves as "the editors" of the Signpost here form only a minority of the current team (in particular, they don't include the current editor-in-chief). This goes in particular for the video: While Bluerasberry has done lots of good work for the Signpost, he has also long had an unhealthy tendency to speak for the Signpost as a whole when expressing his personal conceptions of it; and there have been various occasions where several other people from the Signpost team felt that these conceptions were seriously at odds with basic journalistic standards, such as disclosing major conflicts of interests or separating advocacy and reporting. That is to say that you follow Bluerasberry's advice near the end of the video at your own risk (e.g. just a few weeks ago, ArbCom sanctioned a user for a topic ban violation stemming from their Signpost submission that Bluerasberry had supported and encouraged, after having already previously invited a similarly problematic submission by the same user that was rejected by the rest of the Signpost team).

Again, most of the suggestion here are great (including everything in the "10–30 minutes" section). But for others, particularly under "long-term", some of the information contradicts the Signpost's actual practices and documentation (under e.g. "Coordination", "Content guidance" or "About"). To give a concrete example (I already named some other discrepancies in our internal Newsroom talk page shortly after this was published): This article claims that The publication manager is also able to pull the trigger themselves whenever they feel that The Signpost is ready for its monthly publication. But that authority has always been reserved to the Signpost's editor-in-chief, as documented under Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Coordination#Publication_Manager (and recently we carefully developed an modification of that under WP:EICAWOL). So don't believe this article that if you follow the invitation here and sign up for that role, you can publish in the Signpost whatever you like whenever you like ("feel ... is ready for publication").

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:36, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Regarding "in the media": First of all one should add to Wikipedia:Press coverage 2026, not skip ahead to the Signpost. -Lupe (talk) 08:19, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

🤪 Bluerasberry (talk) 14:18, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Humour: Group of banned T-shirt makers comes out of hiding to sell new Wikipedia-themed merchandise (1,707 bytes · 💬)

• An FA "Cup" that's actually a mug? Why I hope somebody got fired for that blunder. Roast (talk) 12:33, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  That's why I would call it the FA Mug (or the Featured Article Mug). Alfa-ketosav (talk) 08:55, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

• The FA Cup eh? The Football Association's copyright lawyers will be on the phone to WMF on Monday! ;) The C of E God Save the King! (talk) 12:50, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• Uncouth. I like it! kencf0618 (talk) 13:14, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• I like the t-shirts! ~2026-25199-97 (talk) 22:37, 21 June 2026 (UTC)
• Is this supposed to read like an ad piece or do I lack humour? ;) --ABx11 (she/they | formerly TheAuroraBorealis | In solidarity) 03:26, 22 June 2026 (UTC)
• I kinda want the FA cup and the pessimist shirt. Those are great, haha. Love including WP:NAW in there. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:14, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

In focus: A global standard for Neutral Point of View (667 bytes · 💬)

There is no neutral point of view, and "consensus" building often ends up as a vote. That such a vote ends differently in different Wikipedias is neither a surprise nor fixable by a global policy relying on "consensus" again after all. That it claims to be exempt from consensus is ironic but mostly symbolic and unpracticable. I have a feeling that any issues that led to the desire for a global policy won't be fixed by it. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:53, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

In the media: Who won a 14th century battle and who won the 2026 Iran war? (425 bytes · 💬)

• "Wikipedia Lists Result of Iran War as 'Iranian Victory'": Though that appears to be a foregone conclusion. As of now the war's still ongoing, and a description as such maybe WP:CRYSTAL. Gotitbro (talk) 05:48, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

News and notes: Community Tech development team disbanded (4,571 bytes · 💬)

New account creation flow: The WMF has finally noticed, after being told for years by the volunteer community, that the account-creation UX is fundamentally broken. Not only is there a drop in the number of registrations, but while the stream of new articles has not decreased, the shape of it has evolved into new challenges to be surmounted. The Wikimedia Foundation works with communities on solutions to change this trend (WMF announcement); where is the evidence of this other than deeply buried discussions with a few selectively appointed representatives of minor affiliates? Too often, experienced editors' warnings about reader and contributor behaviour are overridden by the WMF’s assumptions about what users ought to want. The result is predictable: features are built, volunteers explain why they will fail, they fail, and only then are they reconsidered.

The issue is not programming ability but organisational culture; volunteers with experience in UX and UI design who build and maintain the encyclopaedia have repeatedly warned that these changes would create unnecessary barriers, yet those concerns have largely been dismissed. Fifteen years ago, it was still possible for experienced volunteers to discuss these issues directly with the Foundation's technical leaderships and influence the outcome. As the organisation has grown, that dialogue has largely disappeared and until the political and cultural divide between the Foundation and its volunteer communities is addressed and the Foundation learns to treat its volunteer communities as a source of expertise rather than simply a constituency to be consulted, I see little reason to expect meaningful change for potential new users any time soon. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:18, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

To put it another way, if the Foundation doesn't think the user requirements for its tools should come from the people who use the tools, who does it think they'll come from? And, if they don't have a technical channel for gathering and analysing user requirements, how are the requirements going to arrive and be implemented? Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:48, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

* One problem with asking users is, we know what we want. As Henry Ford said, "If I had asked people what they want, they would have said a faster horse." Cars were already being manufactured; it's just that very few people bought them. Inventors were creating all kinds of crazy machines they hoped would sell. A few did; most were quickly forgotten. What we are trying to hook are newbies who, like potential motorists of a century and a quarter ago who did not know that they wanted a car, must be outguessed. The assumption they want the tools we have, but better in ways that are important to us experienced editors, may be completely irrelevant. If WMF had imaginative designers trying odd ideas, knowing most of them would fail, we might get enough right guesses to bring out another million editors who do something useful in Wikipedia every day. Or not; the only test is a gamble. Jim.henderson (talk) 06:28, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

The difference between the Ford statement and the current WMF situation is that veteran Wikipedians with qualifications in the subject matter (UX psychology and UI design) are asking the WMF for improvements based on solid community empirical evidence rather than asking for entirely new products and solutions. The biggest challenge to the maintainers and gatekeepers of Wikipedia articles is the exponential growth in the development and use of AI, and the Foundation, as usual, is dragging its heels. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:14, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

• We at Wiki Project Med have put together a team of three programmers to work on Community wishes. Difficulty is the new format of continuous submissions make it more difficult to determine which ideas have the most community support. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:26, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

On the bright side: Flowers, blue helmets, reefs, pride, and Juneteenth (833 bytes · 💬)

Lovely work, thank you for all of this! ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:09, 22 June 2026 (UTC)
Didn't know this column existed! 97104, not 97100! (t•c•r•l) 14:21, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Op-ed: Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures (6,860 bytes · 💬)

• Thought provoking, I have never heard of your or many of these ideas thanks for sharing Czarking0 (talk) 03:21, 25 June 2026 (UTC)
• An AI-driven article extolling AI, it would seem. Carrite (talk) 04:29, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  What do you mean by "AI-driven", and why do you think this article is "AI-driven"? (FWIW)

  Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:17, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  I can confidently say that AI tools were never used in this essay. I have written a number of things offwiki with Claude or Gemini first drafts, but this essay has 3- 4 months of drafts untouched by AI tools. I primarily use Ai tools as a research and coding assistant, but not for this essay, Sadads (talk) 21:28, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• I found this article thought provoking and refreshingly optimistic. Some of these proposals would require major investments on our side, or institutional side e.g for Wikipedians in Residence type programs. Our current fundraising banner appeals do rely on traditional eyeball traffic. Providing Wikimedia Enterprise API licensing might be one way to obtain new revenue, but I believe the number of customers or charging per client is still too low for what we'd need. What are your thoughts? ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 11:11, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  Its not just enterprise, also a substantial amount of the money raised each year is coming through emails, recurring donors and major gifts all three of which need a health pipeline of prospecting, but isn't going to go off a cliff with loss of readers and banners.

  One of the unusual things about the Foundation is the lack of leverage used to take money from foundations and grant programs as well: programmatic activities in education and high impact scholarly communities (like libraries) would also make the Foundation eligible for other kinds of restricted and unrestricted money from major donors and name foundations -- but requires having those program. For example, Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom (that I mentioned) has been a successful source of fundraising for affiliates -- but the big money for it only comes from US philanthropy and thus would need to be redistributed from the central organization. Large civil society orgs in human rights or climate, or movement building orgs like Amnesty or Greenpeace, take large pools of money to support movement building, but a large chunk of that kind of money needs to be spent on actual programmatic investment not maintenance of software. Movement strategy had much clearer recommendations for how the Foundation and large affiliates could play more of a redistributive roll of these kinds of programmatic resources, Sadads (talk) 15:59, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

• This mirrors a lot of what I've been thinking on this issue, and I like that there are actual proposed measures to be taken here. I think there's value in having an encyclopedia even if that's not what everyone is looking for all the time. Wikipedia doesn't have to serve every purpose. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:43, 21 June 2026 (UTC)
• As someone who has successfully enticed a few new editors, including one who now vastly surpasses me in contributions, I really appreciate the "lobster trap" metaphor. I increasingly think that editing Wikipedia is a hobby that many but not most people can enjoy, and outreach should focus on people who signal a "pre-Wikipedian" disposition. I am not convinced that readers, even quite active readers, are giving us that signal. (My pet, crank theory is that we should give wikipedian-in-residence grants to graduate students who promise to update articles while studying for their comprehensive exams... in my experience, the median grad student is much closer to the "editing disposition" than the median person off the street.) Thank you for this thoughtful article! ~ le 🌸 valyn (talk) 21:23, 21 June 2026 (UTC)
• The sections about the reader-editor funnel and curiosity-first editors resonates well with me, and I think both of them hold a lot of potential for new strategies. I would even go so far to say that it might have been better to publish those as a separate article, because everything about AI here is so much less substantial in terms of how to find and retain new editors without scaring off the existing ones that we had to wade through it to find the golden nuggets. Ainali (talk) 07:23, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

  I think the challenge is that we need whatever strategy WMF takes (and we demand as an editing community), to reflect the fact that readership is no longer the main way we have to evaluate the impact of content, but also AI consumption, and that is likely to drive a wave of both bad faith new contributors and new ways of thinking about which content to update, Sadads (talk) 18:44, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

  But as with all things Wikimedia, feel free to remix and reuse! The idea of the op-ed was to imagine a slightly more optimistic, and positive way, of thinking about the future of editing, Sadads (talk) 18:45, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

• This is a rich and detailed article, thank you! I'd like to point out that it's built around the interests of the Platform and Editors; however, it's also useful to consider it from the perspective of the User/Reader (not just their changing behavior, but their interests and goals, including within the Platform). Don Stroud (talk) 19:41, 2 July 2026 (UTC)
• The sections about readership are good, the sections about AI are not. Wikipedia should not associate with AI. --I sometimes eat bananas, and you can talk to me here: (talk) 13:23, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

Opinion: Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts (14,930 bytes · 💬)

• WMF's six-figure-salaried engineers organizing to get more of that lovely, lovely donor money that WMF skims off our work fills me with the same feelings of righteous rebellion and solidarity as would news of an organizing campaign by Norwegian harp seal pup whackers. Carrite (talk) 04:33, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• As far as I can tell, what the union is asking for are actually a bunch of very reasonable requests (and it's a shame that internal culture is that bad for them to be nessecary) and only one of these would involve pay. I'm also under the impression that generally speaking, WMF staff are paid less than the industry average. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 09:33, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• If Wikimedia staff were the reasons why editors are not paid, I would agree with you. If they were doing absolutely nothing with their paid-labor. As Clover mentioned above, two things can be true. Many (not all) staff make above-average salaries, but they are also making below the market rate for tech salaries within the same industry. As a person making 70,000€ myself I am firmly in support of WWU, because I know their success would benefit me and others -- unlike the seal clubber analogy you provided.

They are not doing the same thing that volunteers are doing. If they were, the argument would go both ways, compensate volunteers (turning them into paid editors/freelancers/employees) or fire the staff who are doing redundant work. I do think there are some genuine overlapping cases here, particularly around moderation which asides from pay, also has mental health/safety risks for both volunteers and paid staff alike, one of the non monetary focuses of Wiki Workers United.

User:Hexatekin published some excellent research on the state of volunteer labor and proposals forward. Dorothy Howard. Thoughts on Wikipedia Editing and Digital Labor, April, 2014. (self-published) R. Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani. The labor of maintaining and scaling free and open-source software projects. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 5, no. CSCW1 (2021): 1-28. Dorothy Howard & Lilly Irani. 2019. Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘19). Awarded Honorable Mention (top 4%). Dorothy Howard. "Wikipedia, work, and capitalism. A realm of freedom?" [Book review], Wikimedia Research Newsletter, March 2017 ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 10:59, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

• Evidently, I also support the WWU, but I just looked up what 70,000 euros would be equivalent to in CAD and that's about three times as much as I've ever made in a year. Conversations about money can get uncomfortable fast, but I do think it's important to be mindful how much harder it is for people who are in more precarious situations. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 11:26, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the shoutout User:Shushugah! I am proud of this review and the book itself is good - Dorothy Howard. "Wikipedia, work, and capitalism. A realm of freedom?" [Book review], Wikimedia Research Newsletter, March 2017. And here's the link to the peer-reviewed paper we wrote based on 37 interviews about labor with core open source maintainers, many volunteering their time: R. Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani. The labor of maintaining and scaling free and open-source software projects. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, CSCW1 (2021): 1-28. Hexatekin (talk) 23:12, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

• I have two thoughts on this. 1) We really should put up a Main Page banner encouraging people to pause all donations. It might not matter much to the WMF’s pockets given the sheer amount of money they already have; I don’t think they’d start to run out of money that quickly. But it’d get the attention of news organizations if it were something everyone saw on the Main Page immediately after opening Wikipedia to do anything, rather like how the donation banners are organized. Millions, if not billions, of people use Wikipedia to look stuff up. That could have a serious impact.

And 2) is it just me who finds it a little suspicious that more news outlets haven’t covered this by now? I’d like to believe that the WMF hasn’t actually fallen so far as to participate in blatant news suppression, but given how easily news media has been manipulated by other powers-that-be in the past couple of years, it probably wouldn’t be hard for them in this weird time period we live in right now. I don’t think I believe just yet that the WMF would really do that, but it does seem like an odd coincidence. Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} -⃝⃤ (they/he) In solidarity. 09:46, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

While to many Wikipedians the news of the Union and dismantling of the Tech Team will feel monumental, but in terms of the grand scale of things happening around the globe, it is far from a point where it has the potential to alter the fabric of society, nor is it something highly dramatic, or anywhere close to the most potent political fodder out there. In certain circles of the internet, this has grabbed some attention from some topic focused outlets, with the banner at the top of the talk page for the solidarity page listing around 15 sources across several languages, and there is probably a bunch not listed there. Mitchsavl (talk) 05:19, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

That’s fair; I do have a tendency to overestimate the importance of Wikipedia to the world at large, and it’s definitely true that there are more attention-drawing things happening globally right now. Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} -⃝⃤ (they/he) In solidarity. 08:03, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

A main page banner would definitely get a lot of attention to underpaid staff. Guz13 (talk) 19:13, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

• This is an excellent strategy for getting news attention again when we need it (and also potentially making a financial dent) but there is also potential tradeoffs to this approach. No one wants to financially hurt or disrupt WMF this early in the stage, but from my personal point of view, it should remain an option...closer to a last resort if all else fails. ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 10:59, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  I agree; I wouldn’t want to do anything that would be harmful to the WMF’s funding right now, but I also don’t think this’d make that much of an impact financially if it’s only up for around 24 hours, if that. Even 12 would most likely be enough to catch the media’s attention, since at some point someone who works for a big news outlet is going to go to Wikipedia to fact-check something or other, without disrupting the WMF financially too badly. It could be effective at garnering media coverage without the drawbacks being that bad.

  Although, another issue we’d have to consider would be how the media would actually cover it if we did this, and which parts of it they’d talk about. News organizations sometimes seem to not understand how certain aspects of Wikipedia really work, and I wonder if they’d be readily able to explain all the nuance correctly. They could leave out parts without realizing it, and although I doubt that would happen—or that it’d be that much of a problem if they did, since they’d at least get the gist correct—we might not get the sort of media coverage we’d expect if we went through with this.

  I think I’d be happy no matter how media portrays it just as long as they talk about it, though; raising awareness and having the public talk about what’s happening is a union’s best tool (along with strikes). It could also get us more signatures on the more general petition over at Meta (since signatures on the enwiki solidarity petition from people who’ve never edited before wouldn’t mean much).

  Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} -⃝⃤ (they/he) In solidarity. 08:35, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

• I hope the WWU succeeds, but I consider the mere possibility of a mass disruption of Wikipedia maintenance to be a far bigger threat to the project than WMF lay-offs. The fact that so many editors are even willing to consider throwing the project under the bus for a separate organization has been eye-opening. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:26, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  @Thebiguglyalien it may be a separate organization but the people involved ARE Wikimedia Foundation to a large extent, and the organizational problems are longstanding, from Board of Trustee elections, Community Wishlist etc.. they are all widely felt issues. I share your concern, and hope we can find an amicable solution. ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 16:44, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

  I agree with Shushugah; even if it’s a separate organization, what it does seriously affects us here on Wikipedia. A day or two of the site going unmaintained in exchange for the Community Wishlist back, which would improve how WP works drastically over the next several years, is worth it.

  Wouldn’t you have agreed with Wikipedia editors going on a collective strike for a bit in exchange for XTools, syntax highlighting, dark mode, et cetera? The Community Wishlist created incredibly useful things, and I love Wikipedia to bits, but I’d quit editing it for as long as was needed for this; it’s to improve the project a lot in the long run rather than improving it just the same as we do every day in the short run, which I think is our duty. It’s the difference between normalcy now and a worse situation later, or facing unknown territory now and a better world here later.

  I’m not saying I think we’re likely to go on strike. I’m not even saying we should go on strike. But if a situation arose where it was needed, it would be worth it. Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} -⃝⃤ (they/he) In solidarity. 09:11, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

  This makes a lot of assumptions that I don't believe are true. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:51, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

  To clarify on the assumptions in your comment specifically:

  • There's no agreement it would only be "a day or two".
  • The previous point is part of a larger problem where no one agreed on what a strike would actually look like and people have essentially signed a blank check on what it would entail.
  • There would be lasting consequences both internally and externally. This might include cleaning up the damage (which will be more severe when news breaks that Wikipedia is unmoderated) and renewed public distrust of a Wikipedia that can go mostly unmoderated at any moment.
  • An editorial strike is an entirely separate beast from a workers' strike where, among other things, the target is indirect (Wikipedia) rather than directly leveled at the employers (WMF), and the employers are funded by donations rather than profit from production.
  • In part because of the previous point, there's no reasonable confidence that a strike will actually result in any negotiation or meeting of demands that may or may not be possible. It would be easier for the WMF to wait until it blows over and people return to editing, which will happen because there's no incentive to commit to a strike long term. The motivations are outrage (which is always temporary) and the romanticizing of labor movements and the excitement of seeing oneself as part of one (which will eventually be outweighed by participating in one's hobby). There will also be underwhelming turnout because of the aforementioned issue where people have agreed to a strike in theory but have not been told how it would be implemented or what the terms would be.

  In short, an editorial strike could work, but the odds of success as you're describing aren't nearly sufficient to justify the risk. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:52, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

  The risks are great, but I disagree on that those risks mean that a strike would be unjustified. Whether the ends justify the means tends to be a more subjective and variable opinion from person to person; that’s where our difference of opinion seems to lay. I’m going to agree to disagree with you on this. Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 ^{(𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨)} -⃝⃤ (they/he) In solidarity. 19:50, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Recent research: Proposed tagging system for AI involvement; successful and unsuccessful AI tools for contributors (6,031 bytes · 💬)

Why do you continue to share research that has not been peer reviewed or published without labeling it as such? This is misleading for readers and dishonest when it would be incredibly simple to simply transparently label the unreviewed research. ElKevbo (talk) 22:14, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

The community is also divided on what to do, with some advocating for a prohibition of AI tools and others embracing use of tools for light editing or even more. – Here we really are very divided, except for that one time and that other time and that other time and that other time and that other time and that other time and that other time and that other time and ...
fully prohibiting AI generated text is impractical because many editors already rely on tools ... – many editors also rely on getting discreetly paid for making promotional edits and yet promo and UPE are still forbidden, even though they're also impossible to stop entirely, how curious.
Why bother covering this unreviewed LLM-generated (seriously, it's bad) paper about why and how we must embrace LLMs? fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 06:14, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

unreviewed - what are you talking about? It is a peer-reviewed paper, published in the proceedings of a reputable conference.

LLM-generated - what is that conclusion based on?

Here we really are very divided, except for [...] - are you saying that there is a community consensus to prohibit the use of LLMS for light editing? In that case you might want to familiarize yourself with WP:NOLLM, in particular the part of this policy that starts with Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing [...].

(I do agree that the UPE example shows how a policy doesn't need to be perfectly enforceable to be useful. In any case though, my or our perfect agreement with every single argument made in a paper is not and will not be a criterion for covering it here.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:19, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

You're right that it is stated to have undergone single-blind review, though not one facilitated by a journal as far as I can tell, struck.

what is that conclusion based on? – The text within is full of common AI constructions to a degree that it interfered with my ability to read it, This scenario reflects an emerging workflow ... This case study illustrates ... create significant challenges ... Research on Wikipedia governance has emphasized the importance of community ... and many more longer examples, lots of parallel constructions, rules of three, grammar choices etc. You don't have to take my word for it though, for the sake of irony I've also ran section 5.3 of the paper through Pangram and GPTZero, two of the most robust automated detectors , and they both returned 100% for AI generation as well. (section 5.2 also returned 100% for both, I checked no other sections as my credits aren't infinite)

are you saying – I'm saying that enwiki is not divided on what to do. We've found ourselves capable of asking and answering the "is AI good?" question many times, and the answer has continued to be a broad "no". WP:NOLLM was adopted 45 to 2, this is not a community divided on if the middle path the paper takes is acceptable. AI-positive papers created with AI about why and how we simply have to accept AI because it's impossible to ban and is actually good (if it's not bad), are junk. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 08:03, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Supporting NOLLM is emphatically not the same as answering "No" to the question "is AI good?" Alaexis_¿question? 11:35, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Statement 1: The answer to "is AI good?" has been a broad "no". Statement 2: NOLLM indicates the community isn't undecided on if a middle-path approach to AI is appropriate. Secret statement 3: NOLLM asked "is AI good?" and the community said "no" full stop. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 00:27, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

ChatGPT assistance improved student editors' "linguistic polish", but did not improve (or worsen) content quality or verifiability means that using ChatGPT is a win-win (assuming these results can be trusted). Alaexis_¿question? 11:33, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

Technology report: Community Tech team is disbanded, controversy erupts (1,839 bytes · 💬)

Traffic report: 'Cause this is thriller, thriller night (658 bytes · 💬)

Love it. All eyes on this year's World Cup. Let's go Africa! Volten001 ^☎ 04:14, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Slight chronology mistake - Burnham didn't resign as mayor until he won the byelection. Burnham resigned as mayor on 19 June 2026 the day after the byelection. TomJB1 (talk) 17:55, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

WikiConference report: Report of Volunteer Supporters Network Annual Meeting 2026 (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-06-21/WikiConference report