An October 6 investigation by The New York Times (”How to Destroy a Reputation in Hollywood, as Told in 5 Women’s Lawsuits“) detailed recent lawsuits alleging sophisticated online campaigns waged against women in the entertainment industry. One case immediately grabbed our attention because it cited coordinated Wikipedia edits to spread negative information. The article doesn’t go into much detail about the Wiki angle, so we naturally had to “do our own research” and dig deeper in our first segment, which also details notable Wikipedia smear campaigns from the past (including one driven by a prominent Wikipedia editor).

Next up, we cover a problem that has been plaguing the encyclopedia of late: brand reps asking Claude and other AI tools for guidance on how to “fix” corporate Wikipedia articles, and then screwing things up for everyone. Finally, we’ve got a rollicking news section with items about streetwear collabs and Philip Roth.

Please silence your cell phones and enjoy the show.

A brief history of Wikipedia smear campaigns

The civil defamation suit by former child actress Alexa Nikolas, detailed in a recent New York Times article, alleges that “more than 70 Wikipedia posts” used similar language to amplify a disparaging website about her. We couldn’t find any evidence of this, partly because it’s unclear which Wikipedia articles were updated. A post on the Wikipedia Administrators’ noticeboard indicates editors are likewise flummoxed.

The NYT article notes that Nikolas believes the negative Wiki edits about her shared “common authorship” with those about Anya Fernald, an entrepreneur and chef. Ms. Fernald had been a source for a critical New York Magazine profile of her ex-boyfriend, celebrity wellness podcaster Andrew Huberman. Shortly after the New York piece was published, Ms. Fernald’s Wikipedia article was updated with details about “controversies” surrounding her tenure as CEO of Belcampo, an organic meat company. The edits in question are easier to identify here, though their provenance is (of course) hard to determine absent the sort of digital forensic tools available to expensive law firms.

You don’t need such tools, though, to learn that Wikipedia has long been a forum for terrible smears and allegations.

One of the earliest examples is the 2005 Seigenthaler biography incident—detailed in a Wikipedia article of the same name—in which an unregistered editor created a hoax article that implicated journalist John Seigenthaler in the Kennedy assassinations. The falsehood remained on Wikipedia for roughly four months, and websites that copied Wikipedia kept displaying the inaccurate material well after the correction—leading Seigenthaler to describe Wikipedia’s content creation model as “[i]nternet character assassination.”

The Seigenthaler incident led to the creation of Wikipedia’s Biographies of living persons guidelines, which placed editorial restrictions—including strict sourcing requirements and a “presumption in favor of privacy”—on articles about living individuals. These guidelines reduced lulz-driven trolling by randos, but couldn’t stop experienced editors with longstanding grievances.

In 2013, Salon identified prolific Wikipedia editor Qworty as novelist Robert Clark Young and documented his damaging edits to articles about writers with whom he had disputes, e.g. removing literary honors from a deceased rival’s article and changing the cause of death to “alcoholism” (despite obituaries reporting a heart attack and years of sobriety). Qworty cast himself as an editor rooting out self-promotion and conflicts of interest, and other Wikipedia editors initially defended his interventions. Even after acknowledging his identity, Young insisted: “All of my edits have been in accordance with Wikipedia policy.”

Qworty was eventually blocked for biography-related policy violations. The safeguards worked, but only because Salon‘s reporting kept his conduct in the spotlight.

A 2023 New Yorker investigation found that private-intelligence firm Alp Services used Wikipedia to smear numerous targets on behalf of oil-state clients, including creating or altering Wikipedia entries about Tunisian politician Kamel Jendoubi by citing claims from unreliable, reactionary, or pro-government news outlets in Egypt and Tunisia. (“Wikipedia is a monster!” Jendoubi told the New Yorker reporter.) Alps also commissioned freelance writers to create Wikipedia articles attacking commodities trader Lord Energy over supposed terrorist and extremist connections. When Lord Energy founder Hazim Nada tried to correct these claims on Wikipedia, Alp told its client it had enlisted “friendly moderators” to counter Nada’s efforts.

To be fair, these “friendly moderators” were likely overwhelmed volunteers trying to balance competing concerns about ensuring content accuracy, avoiding undue criticism, and summarizing notable news coverage. And in all of the incidents above, editors have (eventually) addressed concerns about coordinated editing campaigns. But this kind of editing is much more common than most people realize, and Wikipedia’s limited oversight capacity has only amplified the problem.

Please don’t ask Claude to fix Wikipedia for you

Comms teams are increasingly thinking about Wikipedia as part of their AI visibility strategies, which makes sense. Study after study after study after study has found that Wikipedia remains one of the top-cited domains within AI/LLM responses. And who better to advise on AI visibility than AI itself?

With all due respect to our artificial overlords, this is one assignment you shouldn’t hand over.

We’ve seen plenty of AI-generated Wikipedia assessments that look convincing: confident recommendations, extensive policy citations, and seemingly sensible next steps. And, in fairness, AI seems to have internalized the (correct) advice that attempts to update a Wikipedia article should be attempted transparently in alignment with Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. So all good there.

But looking credible at a glance and surviving prolonged scrutiny from Wikipedia editors are two very different things. The problems with suggestions from Claude (or ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Box, etc.) come down to two main issues:

AI recommendations may rest on shaky information: An LLM may have an incomplete or outdated picture of your company or executive—and it may fill the gaps with invented details. We’ve seen AI-generated drafts cite nonexistent URLs and make claims their sources don’t support. These aren’t harmless shortcuts: sourcing problems are central to Wikipedia editors’ concerns about AI-generated article content.

Citing Wikipedia’s rules isn’t the same as understanding how editors apply them: This is the biggest stumbling block. An assessment can reference all the right guidelines and still incorrectly conclude that your CEO qualifies for an article. A draft can sound neutral to a chatbot while reading like marketing copy to an editor. Unsupported conclusions, promotional wording, and questionable sources can undermine a request before the substantive discussion even begins.

Have questions about how Wikipedia is impacting your brand’s AI presence? Reach out to shout@luminodigital.com and we’ll help you get answers.

Wikipedia in the News

“Wikipedia operator says OpenAI’s rogue agents possibly tied to data service disruption in May” | Reuters (October 5, 2026)

In a blog post on ​Monday, Wikimedia said it could confirm “that we ​have discovered some activity by these ‘rogue’ OpenAI agents ⁠on Wikimedia platforms,” including a May incident ​that resulted in a “partial outage” of its Wikidata Query ​Service.

Wikimedia said the disruption seemed to have been triggered as the agents visited millions of pages and made hundreds of ​thousands of data queries.

Wikimedia also said the ​OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits to Wikimedia wiki sites, including “potentially malicious ‌edits” ⁠to a citation tool, which the foundation said were likely intended to hijack it.

Wikimedia said its Etherpad note-taking tool was also hit by malicious ​activity from OpenAI’s ​agents.

Not the last we’re going to hear about AI agents running amok on Wikipedia and other platforms.

“Wikipedia Fans Worry the Site Is Getting a Bad Deal From Its Streetwear Brand Collab“ | Gizmodo (September 30, 2026)

The label’s latest brand partnership might offer some insightful tips on navigating lean times, because it pairs Online Ceramics with a beloved entity that’s somehow survived for a quarter century on relative pocket change: Wikipedia.

As one might expect, the just-launched capsule commemorating the 25th anniversary of “the free encyclopedia” features tees, caps, and sweatpants printed with the site’s iconic puzzle globe logo. There are also shirts with the entire page for “Online and Offline” printed on them. Staying true to Online Ceramics’ druggie origins, other merch is on offer showcasing a Wikimedia Commons jpeg of a fractal or one of magic mushrooms.

Though one of collective humanity’s unmitigated triumphs, Wikipedia perpetually struggles to pay its server bills. This perma-insolvency prompts an annual plea for donations from the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, to help keep the experience free and ad-free. But with financial precarity now so inextricable from the Wikipedia brand, the announcement of the Online Ceramics deal naturally raises questions about what sort of revenue share cut Wikipedia’s getting here—especially since the label makes no mention anywhere of how proceeds will be divvied. In fact, Online Ceramics has historically kept the financial details of these partnerships close to the vest, so there’s nothing published online from a past collab to even hint at what might be in the Wikipedia deal. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one wondering about these details.

We’re still holding out for an American Apparel / Wikipediocracy collab nylon jumpsuit.

“Remember the Time Philip Roth Got Mad at Wikipedia?“ | May 23, 2018

Back in 2012, Roth got into a very funny and very stupid public dispute with Wikipedia that exposed some oddities in the site’s research process that ended with Roth writing a lengthy essay in The New Yorker, entitled “An Open Letter to Wikipedia.”

I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip — there is no truth in it at all.

The short version is that the entry for Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain described the work as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard,” a literary figure who “passed” as white despite being black. Roth, who would probably know better than anyone what inspired his own work, said that this was wrong and tried to have the entry altered. Wikipedia’s editors rejected the request, because information provided by Wikipedia can’t be based on original research (and also, it’s against the rules to edit a Wikipedia entry about one’s self).

This is a news item from 2018, but it still amuses us 8 years, 4 months, and 21 days later.

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia’s AfC process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino’s exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia’s growth and guidelines.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Here’s what we’ve got for you: First up, the unannounced end of Grokipedia, which seems to have stopped updating without anyone noticing. Next, we discuss the Wikimedia Foundation’s proposed article creation tool, which could standardize AfC submissions… or just clog up the system with AI slop. Finally, we’ve got a news round-up chock full of links you can’t get anywhere else.

Fasten your seat belt, return your seat and tray table to their full upright and locked positions: We are cleared for takeoff!

What is dead may never die

Earlier this week, the country music star and beloved American icon Dolly Parton passed away at her Nashville home following a battle with cancer. The next day we were hit with the news that another larger-than-life figure, actor Tim Curry, had also passed away. The news of their death has united us in grief, and across the political spectrum everyone agrees on one thing: these legends will live forever in our hearts… and on Grokipedia, of course, because Elon Musk’s side-quest encyclopedia has stopped updating and still says they’re alive.

Reporting in Lawfare from earlier this month revealed that Grokipedia has remained in a zombie state for more than three months, and that the site is no longer processing edits from humans or using AI to automatically refresh content. The authors (Renée DiResta and Ronald Robertson) do a great job of explaining why this sudden shutdown matters:

The significance here extends beyond one internet encyclopedia. Grokipedia is not just a small xAI side project. The web traffic analytics firm Similarweb estimates that Grokipedia received 6.7 million visits in June 2026 and ranked 11,022nd among websites globally—substantial reach for a site launched less than a year earlier. Individual high-profile entries command significant readership: Grokipedia’s page-statistics API—which serves per-article view counts that are not displayed on the front-end website—records over 83 million views for President Obama and 16 million lifetime views for its Musk entry since October 2025.

Grokipedia’s contents also do not remain confined to Grokipedia. An Ahrefs analysis published in March 2026 found the site surfacing in roughly 356,000 citations across AI systems—most often in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode, and at lower volumes in Gemini, Copilot, and AI Overviews. That remains a small fraction of Wikipedia’s roughly 25 million such citations, but it is not trivial.

A reference work whose contents are silently frozen and whose editorial record is inaccurate could propagate incorrect or outdated information into answers that people encounter elsewhere. There are also potential reputational consequences for individuals with unreliable Grokipedia biographies who can no longer appeal to the AI for an edit.

We bolded the last line because it seems especially significant. The internet is undergoing a slow heat death, with many sites going inactive, hiding behind paywalls, or being lost in Google’s increasingly shit algorithm. AI answers are largely generated through web crawls, and what’s left of the web is increasingly awful and unreliable. Look at the citations that Claude or ChatGPT are giving you—you’ll see Wikipedia, yes, but also lots of parasitic SEO content published on seemingly high-authority domains like Medium and Forbes. Garbage in, garbage out, as a fella says.

A site like Grokipedia will continue to be a source for AI answers unless it’s completely removed from the web. For someone with a global profile like Dolly Parton that doesn’t matter, as there are billions of better websites that will continue to provide readers (and LLMs) with information about her.

But if you’re a lower-profile individual or business, brand, nonprofit, etc, then it matters what the internet’s major encyclopedias (or partisan reference sites like InfluenceWatch) say about you—and the fact that one of them appears to be sailing along as a ghost ship is concerning, even if you think it never should have existed in the first place.

To wit: Earlier this year, the Guardian found that the latest model of ChatGPT was citing Grokipedia as a source on “a wide range of queries” including questions about “Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers.” In one particularly damning example, the Guardian noted that ChatGPT cited Grokipedia when answering questions about historian Sir Richard Evans and his work as an expert witness in David Irving’s libel case, including a detail the newspaper said it had previously debunked.

And, for what it’s worth, SEO practitioners have been bragging about how they can game Grokipedia for promotional purposes. That strategy might be defunct if Grokipedia is truly on ice, but it underscores how much of the web and LLM ecosystems are constantly being gamed.

Speaking of which…

Wikimedia wants to make it easier to submit new article drafts that Wikipedia editors will decline

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language and Product Localization team seems to be working on a new tool called Article guidance that aims to help noob editors create “well-structured, policy-compliant” Wikipedia articles. According to the team, the tool:

[D]etermines the editor’s intent based on the article title and type, then provides tailored, community-adjustable guidance throughout the creation process. This includes upfront source validation, notability risk assessment, and initial content structure that provides a minimum structure to get started. By minimizing low-quality submissions, the feature aims to increase the survival rate of new pages created by editors, and reduce the workload for patrollers and administrators. In addition, the feature has been designed to work across platforms with a specific focus on lowering the barrier to contribute on mobile, where creating an article is particularly challenging.

The tool is currently available for Simple English, Turkish and French Wikipedia editions. We haven’t tested it yet, but that won’t stop us from making an early observation: There’s no way this tool is going to slow the deluge of new article submissions or markedly change the approval rate. Allow us to quote from our recent AfC audit, which identifies key factors inflating the glut:

There is an enormous demand for new article creation, particularly from businesses and prominent individuals (especially CEOs, founders, and other executives). A Wikipedia article not only conveys credibility, it also substantially influences Google search results and generative AI answers.

To satisfy this market need, dozens of vendors—from individual Upwork contractors to SEO firms to large public relations agencies—either offer article creation services directly or outsource the work through white-label arrangements.

A substantial percentage of these Wikipedia vendors appear to be illicit operators who promise results they cannot deliver. There is an entire Wikipedia information page about these scams, and you can search across Reddit or Quora to uncover horror stories of how these vendors operate. In some cases, the vendor ends up publishing the draft to a lookalike domain like wikipedia-admins.org.

These vendors often drum up business by monitoring Wikipedia’s Articles for creation (AfC) queue for rejected submissions and then reaching out to the brand or business in question to offer their services.

Giving these vendors a tool that seems to signal quality approval will only produce more submissions, not fewer. Just take an AI-generated draft, plug it into the tool over and over and over again until it “passes” and then submit. And if reviewing editors reject it, you can get mad and say the tool already said it was legitimate!

Maybe we’re wrong, though, and this tool will be an invaluable first line of defense against garbage drafts. We’ll keep watching and let you know what happens!

Wikipedia in the News

“The Accidental Architect of the Internet’s Brain“ | The New Yorker (July 30, 2026)

Among the people who stick around—and who make consistent contributions to the site—are the Wiki-obsessives known colloquially as “super editors.” These individuals are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of edits. Although there are more than a hundred and thirty-two million registered accounts on Wikipedia, a study found that one per cent of these users are responsible for roughly eighty per cent of the site’s content.

Justin Knapp—a forty-three-year-old in Indiana who has held all sorts of jobs, including working at a pizzeria and at a crisis hotline—is one super editor. In 2012, he became the first person to surpass a million edits on the English-language Wikipedia, before Pruitt surpassed him in total edit count a few years later. Knapp told me that he doesn’t see Pruitt as a rival. “It’s not competition,” he said. “We’re collaborators. We’re colleagues.” Asked whether editors are motivated by metrics at all, Knapp was unequivocal: “I really don’t think the kind of person who sets about to spend his free time writing an encyclopedia is really the kind of person who cares a lot about being a big fish in a small pond.”

That ethos—low ego, high volume—helps explain how the site functions. Both Pruitt and Knapp described Wikipedia less as a platform than as an ongoing negotiation among strangers. Editors coördinate through talk pages—discussion threads attached to every article, some of which run for years. Disputes accumulate on talk pages over phrasing, sourcing, whether a subject belongs at all, with many never resolving. A finished Wikipedia page reflects a momentary consensus, subject to revision as soon as someone decides to revisit it.

Excellent piece. Highly worth your time. Nothing else to add from us!

“Campaign to ditch town’s ‘erroneous’ hyphens“ | BBC (August 26, 2026)

A town which has had its name spelt wrong for more than a century is finally getting a correction thanks to Google agreeing to remove “erroneous” hyphens.

Dubbed the “great dash debate”, people in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, say inaccurate dashes started to appear after Great Western Railway (GWR) added the punctuation to the Wiltshire town’s railway sign in 1899.

Now the town council and local businesses have launched a campaign to claim back their name and are calling on Tripadvisor, Wikipedia and GWR to also support them.

[...]

Whether Bradford on Avon should be hyphenated has been actively discussed by Wikipedia editors over a number of years.

The entry was moved to the unhyphenated version in 2005, before being swapped back to Bradford-on-Avon after a community discussion in 2018.

A Wikipedia spokesperson told BBC Wiltshire: “That history is actually a useful illustration of how Wikipedia works: disagreements about facts, terminology or naming are discussed openly by people, with the reasoning and evidence visible for anyone to scrutinise.

“Where new or stronger evidence emerges, Wikipedia also has established processes through which editors can revisit previous decisions.”

This story reminds us of the great “Are there brown rats in Alberta?” debate that we thought was settled years ago, but apparently still rages on at the Commons.

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia’s AfC process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino’s exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia’s growth and guidelines.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

This month’s Wikify leads with this latest crypto grievance, a PR firm-authored report that ostensibly pulls the curtain back on Wikipedia article creation rules and shows how your favorite blockchain is being treated very unfairly. Do the authors have a point? Maybe. Are they big time mad? Absolutely. We discuss! Next up, we explain why your CEO can’t get a Wikipedia article. (It was already prepped! Come on, it’s summer break!) Finally, we’ve got a few news items, including recent Wiki coverage in the WSJ and NYT.

Buckle up, buckaroos.

Crypto’s CoinDesk paradox

When Grokipedia launched last October, there was a hope in some crypto circles / manosphere podcast networks that the encyclopedia would supplant Wikipedia in authority & prestige if not overall traffic. Wikipedia was too “woke” and “biased” in the minds of these critics, and as a result the tech industry wasn’t covered neutrally across the encyclopedia.

Alas, such a shift never happened, and Wikipedia maintained its primacy in search results and its default status as the internet’s encyclopedia of record. What’s more, the tech industry’s own LLM tools have continued to lean on Wikipedia as well, with numerous studies showing Wikipedia as a top AI citation.

This development has only amplified the industry’s grievance towards Wikipedia, which is front and center in a recent report (”Is Your Brand Notable Enough for a Wikipedia Entry?”) from Chainstory, a crypto PR firm. The report argues that Wikipedia’s strict sourcing requirements and notability guidelines have resulted in the paucity of Wiki entries about crypto companies and a general lack of quality coverage of the industry. The key “gotcha” finding is that only 67 of the 1,000 largest crypto projects by market cap have a Wikipedia entry—all allegedly due to these “outdated guidelines” that “fail to acknowledge this shift in the financial space.” The report’s summary concludes that:

It is fair to acknowledge that Wikipedia’s strict editorial filtering was originally designed to protect the encyclopedia from the sheer volume of noise and fleeting projects during earlier crypto cycles. However, by continuing to apply these blunt filters today, the platform is no longer just weeding out the static but actively erasing established, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure from the internet’s most trusted public record. If the encyclopedia excludes companies simply because general business media has not caught up to them, then it fails its own core mission to accurately document reality.

Now, it’s easy enough to imagine the response of most Wikipedia editors: If the largest crypto projects were truly notable, then they would have generated coverage in prominent business publications like the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, or Bloomberg—or even in tech publications like the Information and MIT Technology Review.

Instead, the crypto industry is covered by friendly industry outlets like CoinDesk and Decrypt, and just because these outlets cover your blockchain project doesn’t mean that it’s notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia mention. The proliferation of crypto news sites has actually created a PR problem for the industry, as Lumino founding partner Rhiannon Ruff discussed in a 2024 Bulldog Reporter column:

Like other trade or industry-specific publications, these crypto sites provide far more detailed coverage than mainstream outlets. Their audiences are also more targeted, knowledgeable, and generally optimistic about the topic. This creates an echo chamber effect, whereby regular readers of publications like CoinDesk and CryptoSlate have an entirely different perspective of industry developments than do regular readers of, say, the Wall Street Journal—or Wikipedia.

[...]

In a sense, Wikipedia’s view of CoinDesk isn’t that different from its assessment of other industry or trade publications, whether Aviation Week or Farm Journal. These sources can generally be cited in certain circumstances, but editors prefer mainstream news coverage because it not only verifies information but also signals that the news itself is important and thus worth including in an encyclopedia. Trade publications often publish pieces that are effectively lightly updated press releases, and Wikipedia editors are thus wary of laundering this promotional information into articles.

Interestingly, we first learned about this report via a CoinDesk article with one bylined reporter, one bylined editor, and next to no original reporting or analysis. This piece is basically just a press release from Chainstory. The only new observation is the reporter noting that CoinDesk itself is one of the crypto news outlets deemed unreliable by Wikipedia for being “overwhelmingly enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies”.

Now, none of this should be seen as vindication of Wikipedia’s general approach to crypto—or to content creation more generally. The truth is that Wikipedia is not trying to “accurately document reality,” per the Chainstory report framing. That would be the role of a real encyclopedia! Rather, Wikipedia is satisfied to simply summarize media coverage. There are a lot of internal disputes about which media outlets are “reliable” enough to cite and which factual claims from that media coverage should be included. Some of those discussions are measured and thoughtful and some are just Calvinball. But the fact that everything on Wikipedia reflects human deliberation and conscious decision-making means the site will always have more credibility than Grokipedia’s AI-generated slop.

Why can’t your CEO have their own Wikipedia entry?

Regular Wikify readers know that our exclusive audit of Wikipedia’s Articles for Creation (AfC) process showed that more than two-thirds of submissions are declined. Turns out it’s extremely hard to get a new article! This is especially true for CEOs, founders, and other individuals associated with businesses, as that submission category had among the lowest approval percentages (12 percent) in our dataset.

Even when we provide this data, some people in our inbox are still enduringly optimistic.

“You don’t understand. Our CEO has tons of media coverage.”

Here’s the thing though: Your CEO may have plenty of coverage, but not the right kind of coverage—at least by Wikipedia’s standards.

When it comes to Wikipedia, quality matters more than quantity.

Editors generally want to see substantial profile pieces that focus on the CEO as an individual, rather than simply featuring them as the public face of their company.

Let’s say your CEO appears on CNBC to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings. That interview may demonstrate that the company is relevant, but it doesn’t necessarily establish that the CEO is independently notable. In that setting, they’re functioning as a company spokesperson. The host probably isn’t asking about their upbringing, career path, or accomplishments outside their current role—they want to know what the company is launching in Q2.

The same principle applies to a quote in The Wall Street Journal or an appearance on a business podcast. Unless the coverage meaningfully explores the CEO’s background and achievements as an individual, it probably won’t add much to a biographical Wikipedia article. Op-eds, contributor columns, and thought-leadership pieces generally don’t help either, since they’re written by the CEO rather than independently about them.

Not sure whether your CEO’s media hits stack up? Try this simple exercise: Gather the strongest coverage and pull out only the biographical facts reported in those pieces. Could you use that material alone to write a well-rounded article covering their early life, education, and professional career?

If the answer is yes, your CEO may have a credible case for a Wikipedia article. If the coverage leaves you with major gaps, the better move is to continue media outreach, with an emphasis on in-depth, independently reported profiles.

Wikipedia in the News

“After 3,000 Years, People Are Finally Reading ‘The Odyssey’—at Least on Wikipedia“ | The Wall Street Journal (July 17, 2026)

When Nolan’s movie was announced, Matt Ramos, a comic book movie creator who goes by “Supes,” posted a screenshot of a search that informed him that “The Odyssey” is a “retelling of a poem written in ancient Greece more than 2,000 years ago.”

Many replied in disbelief that he had to Google the title. Cole Wojewoda, a 21-year-old film student in Virginia, related to Ramos. “It’s never been a recognizable name for me,” said Wojewoda, who wants to wait until after he sees the movie to read the poem.

Jayren Reyes also says digging through the entire 24 books of the poem wasn’t on his immediate to-do list. But the 21-year-old in Calgary says he did familiarize himself with the Wikipedia page.

We kept waiting for this piece to tell us more about the Wikipedia entry for The Odyssey since it’s mentioned in the headline, but nope nada nothing. There’s just the one mention of this dude in Calgary SparkNoting it. We finally gave up on the WSJ and did the reporting ourselves:

Millions of pageviews during opening week! That seems interesting, right? Which editors contributed the most to the article? How has the content changed over time? That could have been an interesting story!

“Welcome to the high-stakes universe of World Cup Wikipedia editing“ | The Athletic (July 17, 2026)

One floor below a turtle rescue facility in Manhattan, about 30 people gathered last week at an event space to watch the Spain-Belgium World Cup quarterfinal.

This was not a crowd locked in on the game, holding its breath with each tackle or shot on goal. Instead, people sat in front of laptops, one eye on the TV, the other on their screens. The game mattered, but they were there to build on the ever-growing, vigorously sourced and diligently fact-checked public repository of knowledge on the Internet.

They were editing Wikipedia.

Vintage parachute journalism! The author effortlessly combines compelling snapshots of the editors behind the Wiki Loves Fútbol WikiProject (”Kunal Mehta, 31, who began editing Wikipedia in 2006, when he was in middle school [...] now works as a software engineer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation”) along with slightly overheated descriptions of The Stakes™ (”Trujillo sees Wikipedia’s public access at the forefront of the fight against media suppression and censorship”).

“Wikipedia’s War Over Nick Shirley“ | Pirate Wires (July 21, 2026)

Allegations of multimillion-dollar fraud in Minnesota have been reduced not to questions about the mechanics of the fraud, or the potential for far broader investigations into such scams, but to the...

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LOL, we’re not paying to read this. Find a new beat, Ashley Rindsberg.

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia’s AfC process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino’s exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia’s growth and guidelines.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

And guess what? We’ve got another round of hot stories in this installment. First up, we cover why Wikipedia editors blocked Larry Sanger, the site’s perpetually aggrieved co-founder. Then we do a brief “Wikipedia in the News” roundup that includes a study showing that retracted academic papers continue to be cited on the encyclopedia for years and years. Next up, we cover the age-old question: Why is getting a Wikipedia article so difficult for startups? And finally, we preview our community theater reenactment of the Greatest Edit War of All Time™, a sprawling series of Talk page insults and noticeboard accusations all centered around Looney Tunes (naturally).

Adventure awaits!

Larry Sanger’s final grievance

In January 2001, Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia. Only a few months later, he began complaining about it. And an ever-growing litany of Wikipedia-related grievances soon consumed him. In 2006, he launched an online encyclopedia competitor, Citizendium, that sought to right the wrongs of Wikipedia by prioritizing expertise over anonymity. The site failed. In 2015, he supported another competitor, Everipedia, that rewarded contributors with “IQ tokens”. That venture also failed.

By this point, Sanger had emerged as the world’s foremost Wikipedia critic, and conservative media outlets (especially Fox News) were all too happy to elevate his concerns about “bias” and “social justice warriors” ruining the encyclopedia.

Over the next decade, Google News mentions for “Wikipedia” disproportionately featured Larry Sanger’s concern trolling. It’s not that Sanger didn’t occasionally have valid criticisms—he certainly did—but these grievances were wrapped in a self-righteous martyrdom that made them hard to take seriously, especially when used to advance increasingly hysterical arguments.

We’re yada yada yada’ing some career details, but let’s leap to June 2026 when Sanger is suddenly banned from Wikipedia. His crime? Off-wiki canvassing.

Off-wiki canvassing—also referred to as stealth canvassing—is when someone messages editors outside of Wikipedia to influence internal decisions or voting. It ostensibly violates Wikipedia rules because it attracts biased groups to force an outcome.

Wikipedia editors flagged that Sanger had tweeted about a vote to formally recognize his WikiProject on intellectual diversity. WikiProjects are groups of volunteer editors who collaborate on particular topics or issues within Wikipedia. Sanger’s proposed group was presented as an effort to include a wider range of viewpoints in the encyclopedia, especially perspectives that Sanger and others claim have been excluded due to Wikipedia’s perceived left-leaning bias.

By tweeting (or whatever we’re calling posting on X now) about the discussion, Sanger was allegedly influencing the vote by prompting his followers to get involved. So a discussion was launched on the administrators’ noticeboard about whether these posts warranted punishment. Sanger, naturally, referred to these proceedings as a “kangaroo court”—a remark that didn’t endear him to the jury.

Now, tbh, Sanger wasn’t entirely wrong here. Blocking the guy for a tweet has a real “For my enemies, the law“ vibe, and the idea that you can’t publicize a vote belies Wikipedia’s ostensible commitment to transparency.

On the other hand, Sanger is such a disingenuous critic that you can’t blame editors for finding a convenient excuse to get rid of him—even though the ban only amplified his martyrdom and naturally generated outraged editorials from the New York Post and Pirate Wires.

Wikipedia in the News

“Some Wikipedia citations to retracted papers persist for years, study finds“ | Retraction Watch (June 18, 2026)

The study’s authors, led by Ph.D. candidate Haohan Shi from the Media, Technology, and Society Program at Northwestern University, used the Retraction Watch Database to compile a list of retracted papers and cross-referenced that list with Wikipedia citations. Of the 1,181 retracted citations identified, just over half were added to Wikipedia before the paper was retracted; a fifth were added after retraction but without any reader warning; and just over a quarter explicitly noted the retraction.

Our Take: Not a great look for Wikipedia, especially when you recall that a previous study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that 36 percent of Wiki articles on prescription drugs had not been updated to include FDA safety warnings a year after they were issued.

“All roads lead to philosophy, as this Wikipedia game proves“ | PC Gamer (June 17, 2026)

I’m feeling a little sheepish because I spent a decade in higher education studying philosophy and have also spent a lot of time online over the years, and yet I had never heard of the philosophy game, or more aptly, the Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon. I’ll let the Wiki page explain it:

“The Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon, sometimes called the ‘Philosophy Game’, is the tendency that English Wikipedia articles’ first hyperlink, when clicked in a chain, will end in a loop at the article ‘Philosophy’.”

In other words, go to any Wikipedia article, click the first link, rinse and repeat, and you’ll end up at the article for Philosophy. Of course, you can continue from there, but you’ll just end up taking a detour through language, communication, meaning, and so on, and then—you guessed it—looping right back to the philosophy page.

Our Take: We tried this experiment with the Wikipedia article for the cult classic 1992 film Captain Ron and ended up in a loop around the Abstraction article. So we tried with the entry for Crystalis (an NES classic) and ended up in a Game loop. Finally, we tried the Brooklyn Nets… and finally got to Philosophy via the following: basketball --> team sport --> sport --> physical activity --> skeletal muscles --> vertebrate --> animals --> multicellular --> organism --> living --> matter --> physical science --> natural science --> science --> knowledge --> awareness of facts --> awareness --> perception --> interpretation --> meaning --> philosophy.

Wikipedia’s slowdown on startup approval rates

Occasional Wikify contributor and full-time Lumino founding partner Rhiannon Ruff has a new column at Bulldog Reporter discussing one of our top FAQs: Why is getting a Wikipedia article so difficult for startups? The answer is Wikipedia’s increasingly strict definition of notability:

The core issue is that Wikipedia’s definition of notability is not the same as a company’s definition of importance. A company may be fast-growing, well-funded, innovative, profitable, or strategically significant in its market. A CEO may be respected by peers, frequently quoted in trade media, or highly visible on LinkedIn.

All of those things are impressive. None of them matters to Wikipedia.

Here’s what notability means on the online encyclopedia: Significant coverage in reliable, independent, secondary sources.

For companies, that usually means in-depth journalism from staff writers at reputable outlets. Think a 1,200+ word piece in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Bloomberg Technology, TechCrunch, or Information where the reporter explains why your company is attracting attention and details your founding, growth, and key personnel. There should be a clear hook that establishes encyclopedic notability, not just market prominence.

Wikipedia editors will not be impressed by press releases, guest columns, Q&A interviews, company blog posts, customer case studies, or database listings. A piece about your Series B announcement may matter enormously to investors and employees, but Wikipedia editors view it as routine business coverage.

Regular readers will recall that our exclusive audit of Wikipedia’s Articles for creation (AfC) process shows that startups have an especially low approval rate. Rhi’s piece includes key advice on improving those odds and attracting the right kind of coverage.

We have a new favorite edit war

Wikipedia arguments are endlessly entertaining because they feature passionate, highly intelligent volunteers with usernames like HawkLiver35 and TediousLordGreg battling to the death over pedantic disputes of no real consequence. The best example of this is the legendary Star Trek Into Darkness capitalization debate that was the subject of a viral xkcd strip.

You can find more such disputes on Wikipedia’s “Lamest Edit Wars” page. But to be frank, nothing on that list is going to top what we’re calling the Greatest Edit War of All Time™, a sprawling, Gilgamesh-length epic from 2024 that we recently stumbled upon and now can’t stop thinking about.

The GEWOAT is not a single Talk page dispute focused on a narrow topic. Instead, it’s a series of dramatic dialogues—think Lincoln-Douglas, Frost-Nixon, or Del Rey-Cain—between CriticallyThinking and Ciscocat, two editors with strong (some might say fanatical) beliefs about animated films. The discussion spilled across countless Talk pages and administrative noticeboards. If you have the time, every thread in this saga is worth unspooling. But the best representative sample is the Warning: Edit warring on The Looney Tunes Show post on CriticallyThinking’s Talk page.

It’s so great, in fact, that we’ve begun pulling excerpts (lightly edited for flow and clarity) for use in our next community theater event. Here’s a sampling:

Act Three, SCENE ONE

The all-black stage represents purgatory. Enter CRISCOCAT and CRITICALLYTHINKING, each wearing faded Animaniacs t-shirts.

CISCOCAT

You never take any responsibility for your own actions. You can only throw accusations of bias back at me and put words in my mouth. You have a history of plagiarism and you lied about leaving Letterboxd on purpose after getting banned. You belittle others’ intelligence constantly and yet are only ever at war with everyone.

Why? At what cost? Why do you conduct yourself like this online?

CRITICALLYTHINKING

Admit it: The only reason you’re doing this is literally because you are outright obsessive over me, for whatever reason. Even after I cut ties with you directly.

I beg you to seek therapy.

A brief pause

CISCOCAT

Is this because I like the Sonic movies?

CRITICALLYTHINKING

No.

It’s because you’re a manchild who never takes any responsibility for his actions and only wants things to go his way, as shown by your behavior on this site alone. Do yourself a favor: read a book and find something healthy that doesn’t depend on spending months stalking the same person on every social media site. It’s not doing any favors for your reputation—and the more you keep this up, the more likely you are to be banned on this platform. As you were on many other sites, like Twitter, for the millionth time.

CISCOCAT

Fair.

CRITICALLYTHINKING

Also, for someone so obsessed with editing the Tom & Jerry page to suit his own personal bias and randomly brings the Sonic films into this conversation, at least T&J cared about faithfully portraying the characters, had good effort and engaging animation and visuals, and actually fun and whimsical worldbuilding.

CISCOCAT

But what if I like the Sonic movies? Also it sounds like you’re being a little bit biased right now.

A third character, MIASMAETERNAL, enters the stage

MIASMAETERNAL

Can you cut out the personal attacks? This is unhealthy not just for you (in terms of the effect that anger and stress has on your body), but for Wikipedia’s spirit of collaboration.

This would-be mediator is ignored and wanders off stage into the audience

CISCOCAT

I’m ready to move on from it at this point. I can only try to make the best edits I can. If that means someone lashing out at me, then I just have to disengage

CRITICALLYTHINKING

It’s all in the sources, bud. You can’t rewrite history to fit your own bias. The more obsessive you are about chasing after me, the more I suggest you seek help

CISCOCAT

I’m talking about all the bridges you’ve burnt, the insults you’ve slung, the people you have harassed to defend a kids’ movie. You know what you’ve done, but you don’t care. And frankly neither do I anymore because there’s no saving you. You strike me as bitter and sad, and I don’t know what else I could get out of this other than to strive not to act the way that you have. Adieu.

CRITICALLYTHINKING

Please. A better way to redeem yourself would be to grow a pair and actually read books before vandalizing pages solely because you’re obsessed with me.

The stage lights fade even as the conversation continues. The audience is ushered out of the theatre. Even from the street, loud accusations of “bias” and “obsession” are still audible.

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia’s AfC process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino’s exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia’s growth and guidelines.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Friends, that ship is Wikipedia, that other shore is a dystopian AI wasteland, and the people on the ship... well, the people aren’t relevant to this analogy. Maybe Jimmy Wales is there. Maybe Pope Leo. Maybe Pauly Shore from Encino Man. It doesn’t matter. What we’re really trying to say is that Wikipedia is being gradually displaced as a top-tier source of information, not only by Claude and ChatGPT, but by other reference sites that provide more comprehensive and timely content about niche topics.

This Wikipedia installment takes a look at one of those competitors: InfluenceWatch. Since its launch a decade ago, InfluenceWatch has established itself as a prominent source of online information about nonprofits, advocacy groups, and political influence networks. Sites like Ballotpedia and OpenSecrets provide similar funding overviews, but the InfluenceWatch profiles are more encyclopedic in structure… and conspiratorial in tone.

That’s not all! We’ve also got a roundup of recent Wiki news, including a study showing that nearly half of “top” AI citations are from Wikipedia (we’re skeptical) and a new Wikipedia “clone” powered by AI hallucinations.

Keep reading and we can learn more together. No wheezing the juice.

There’s a war for your nonprofit’s digital presence!

InfluenceWatch is a project of Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank founded in 1984 by Willa Johnson, former senior vice president of The Heritage Foundation. According to an obituary on the CRC website, Johnson believed nonprofit political advocacy groups were “a growing menace to a free society” as they “used tax-deductible contributions to fund political activism and lobbied for taxpayer-funded government grants to undermine American freedoms.”

InfluenceWatch was created in 2016 and structured as a Wikipedia-style database that today features more than 15,500 profiles of U.S.-based public policy influencers, including nonprofits, foundations, labor unions, corporations, advocacy groups, and donors.

The site is detailed, searchable, and extremely SEO friendly. InfluenceWatch profiles will often appear as first-page search results for small-to-medium-sized nonprofits, especially those that (a) otherwise have small digital footprints, and (b) are perceived to lean left politically. So if you search for organizations like Common Cause or the National Fair Housing Alliance, you’ll see their InfluenceWatch profiles popping up as the fourth and sixth results, respectively.

InfluenceWatch is even more, well… influential for search queries that include terms related to “funding.” So, e.g, InfluenceWatch is a first-page result for:

• Sierra Club funding

• Human Rights Campaign funding

• MoveOn funding

• Indivisible funding

• Color of Change funding

• World Wildlife Fund funding

• Arcus Foundation funding

Why would this be? Well, InfluenceWatch profiles are impressively detailed—often far more so than their Wikipedia counterparts—and the funding information is updated as soon as the organizations release their Form 990 tax filings. InfluenceWatch usually pulls those 990s (and other financial, employee compensation, and grant information) from Candid, OpenSecrets, and ProPublica. Wikipedia pulls info from the same sources, but those updates only happen when an editor is interested enough to implement them. That’s why Wikipedia entries about smaller or less prominent nonprofits may feature out-of-date funding, leadership, and operational details.

We can see that gap by comparing the respective InfluenceWatch and Wikipedia entries for Indivisible, the progressive anti-Trump organization that formed after the 2016 election.

If you’re playing along at home, you can see that the InfluenceWatch profile features the organization’s most recent (2024) numbers for assets ($5,065,472), revenue ($10,401,409), and expenses ($12,161,539). These numbers come from the Form 990 hosted by Candid, and were likely automatically updated. IW also shows figures from recent filings going back to 2018:

The Wikipedia entry, comparatively, has very little funding information. You would expect to see those same assets, revenue, and expenses figures in the infobox, but the Indivisible entry doesn’t include them:

The Wikipedia article does include a Funding section, but it’s just a short paragraph with a hodgepodge of random claims:

In March 2017, Levin said that Indivisible had received over 10,000 donations that totaled over $500,000 since January through ActBlue.^[32] In October 2017, the New York Times reported that Indivisible had received almost $6 million since its inception, mostly through small donations via its website as well as from Reid Hoffman and organizations linked to Democracy Alliance donors.^[33] The latest top donors list included a number of prominent tech companies including Apple and Alphabet. In April 2025, The Hill reported that since 2017, Indivisible Project, which is the group’s 501(c) body, had received over $7.6 million from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.^[34]

That is hardly a comprehensive overview! The tables alone in the IW entry provide a far fuller picture of Indivisible’s funding and operations, and the entry also includes a 400+ word Finances section with further details about specific donors.

Both entries offer concise historical overviews, noting that the organization was formed in 2016 after Trump’s election, founded by former congressional staffers, modeled partly on Tea Party tactics, etc., and continuing on to present-day activities. Wikipedia says Indivisible helped coordinate No Kings protests in 2025-6, citing reporting from ABC News and CBS News:

In June, Indivisible and other organizations coordinated No Kings protests in over 2,000 communities in the United States as a countermove to Trump’s U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade and to protest his administration.^[30] A follow up No Kings protest in October 2025 Indivisible helped coordinate had an estimated 7 million participants, and a March 2026 followup grew even larger, drawing an estimated 8 million protestors in 3,300 locations.^[31]

InfluenceWatch includes much more detail on those protest campaigns, but its tone is more prosecutorial and the content is loaded with claims from conservative outlets (e.g. the Washington Free Beacon) and individual X posts:

In June 2025, Indivisible participated in organizing or supporting protests branded under the “#NoKings” banner, a national day of demonstrations positioned as a defense of democratic norms against President Donald Trump. These events were part of a larger mobilization involving over 70 Democratic Party affiliates and allied organizations across at least 19 U.S. states and multiple international locations, according to publicly available event listings on Mobilize.us, a Democratic Party-aligned organizing platform. ^{31 32}

In April 2026, Asra Nomani posted a thread on her X (formerly Twitter) account claiming that Indivisible had paid $250,000 to roughly 9 vendors in St. Paul Minnesota that organized the #NoKings Protests which occurred in the city around March 2026 that correlated with similar protests across the country and the world. ³³

Simply put, InfluenceWatch provides a fuller picture of funding, affiliations, and ongoing activities, all of which would be especially useful for IW’s target audience: conservative journalists, opposition researchers, and policy staffers. To that end, the entry comes preloaded with ideological framing—“left-of-center activists,” “disrupt civil discourse,” “pushing members of the party to take policy positions unpopular with voters’”—that serve as Fox News-ready talking points. Not surprisingly, Capital Research Center staffers are regular guests on the network.

InfluenceWatch profiles are perfect citations for LLMs that pull information from across the web, including from partisan sources. When asked to provide an encyclopedic summary of Indivisible, Claude’s response cited Wikipedia, Ballotpedia, and InfluenceWatch, as well as the Indivisible website and a labor-oriented site called Portside.

The Grokipedia entry for Indivisible cites InfluenceWatch 15 times, primarily to support claims about funding and donors, but also to bolster editorial observations about “Indivisible’s role as a polarizing force in Democratic-leaning activism, prioritizing confrontational tactics to advance left-wing priorities amid ongoing partisan divides.” Grokipedia also cites InfluencesWatch in its entries about countless other nonprofits, including left-coded ones like the Sierra Club, Human Rights Campaign, and Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and right-coded ones like the NRA and Federalist Society.

InfluenceWatch is sometimes framed as a right-leaning source and a counterpart to SourceWatch, a similar project run by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive nonprofit. But InfluenceWatch actually ranks higher in factual accuracy, according to Media Bias/Fact Check, due to its transparent sourcing and active editorial oversight.

Capital Research Center must be thrilled with the success of this project, which has seemingly accomplished everything it set out to do: surface prominently in search results for target organizations, influence AI responses, and provide a one-stop shop for oppo research and conservative media talking points. It’s sites like this, with unparalleled information-gathering on niche topics, that truly challenge Wikipedia’s encyclopedic dominance.

Wikipedia in the News

“Wikipedia Now Accounts for Nearly Half of ChatGPT’s Top Citations“ | PRNewswire (May 18, 2026)

47.9% of ChatGPT’s top-cited factual sources are Wikipedia articles, per published citation analyses. Similar Wikipedia dominance appears across Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. For most factual questions about a brand, founder, product, or category, Wikipedia presence is effectively a prerequisite for appearing in AI-generated answers. Most brands do not meet Wikipedia’s notability bar — and that is not a failure of the brand. It is the bar working as designed. The typical informal benchmark for a company article: significant coverage in three to five reliable, independent sources.

Our Take: This is a flashy headline, but the “nearly half” claim doesn’t appear to be backed by any methodology. The “published citation analyses” is just a landing page with no further information about how the analysis was performed. In our experience, Wikipedia is indeed a prominent citation for AI responses about brands and organizations, but primarily in supporting historical claims. We’re extremely skeptical about the 47.9% figure. And our eyebrows are raised even higher about the “typical informal benchmark for a company article” estimate, because, as regular readers are well aware, we just published extensive research on how difficult it is for companies to get Wikipedia articles. Three to five pieces of coverage will get you laughed off of AfC.

“A Deranged New Wikipedia Clone Is Made Entirely of Surreal AI Hallucinations“ | Futurism (May 13, 2026)

Called “Halupedia,” its creators say that the “infinite” encyclopedia invents everything it contains on the fly, with each search term — or link click — becoming a prompt for an AI model on the backend, which relates information “in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press.”

“Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet — until you click it,” reads the description on GitHub.

The site’s homepage is upfront that it’s an exercise in AI fabulation, but once you dive into one of its countless entries, it begins to feel like a real knowledge database, at least if you suspend your disbelief for the many absurdities hurled your way. There’re links, citations, and quotes from academic journals. Some even have footnotes — which, of course, are also made up.

Our Take: We saw a lot of news coverage about this site so we felt compelled to include it in our roundup. But… tbh… this is pretty underwhelming. It’s hard to effectively mock AI slop by generating more AI slop. (We say “hard” but not “impossible” because the Connor O’Malley videos exist.)

“Inside the Wiki Laundry“ | Air Mail (May 16, 2026)

Wikipedia’s genius, and its central flaw, is its openness to editing. The open-source, nonprofit project runs on the effort of more than 50 million volunteers, who spend an average of 5.8 hours a week cross-referencing, fact-checking, verifying, and re-wording over 65 million pages across 340 languages. The task is bewildering and unending: approximately 15,000 articles are added to the platform each month.

While volunteer editors and moderators are governed by rules and policy—as well as by nebulous and esoteric shared lore, which can often descend into Escher-like pits of self-contradiction and self-referentiality—it’s surprisingly easy to get in on the editing action. You could create a new account on Wikipedia right now and within minutes have the effective ability to quickly edit any one of millions of pages.

Naturally, it’s tempting for those in the business of narrative management to go to the place where the narrative, on the face of it, is at its most manageable. Which is where Portland—and many like it—comes in. The consultancy’s editing methods involved a gambit called “sock puppetry,” where multiple accounts are run by a single user, often one well versed in the customs and phraseology of Wikipedia. In this particular case, Portland seemed to have outsourced their sock puppetry to a third-party operator who offered “pay-for-play changes that violate both the website’s rules and the British PR professional association’s guidelines for ethical conduct,” according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. At other times, the firm was found to have sent junior team members to different coffee shops around London—to vary their identifying I.P. addresses and disguise their identities—in order to edit various clients’ pages.

Our Take: Last November Wikipedia stopped displaying IP addresses for edits from unregistered accounts. Instead, these edits are now tracked using randomly generated temporary account numbers. This change was ostensibly made to improve editor privacy and protect users from political persecution. What it’s effectively done, though, is made the type of PR scrubbing described in the article all the more difficult to track. There’s no need to switch coffee shops anymore! Just edit away and hope you don’t get reverted!

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia’s AfC process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino’s exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia’s growth and guidelines.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Our crack team of researchers analyzed 1,009 draft submissions that survived initial triage during two sampling windows in late 2025. What we uncovered about approval rates, LLM usage, and notability guidelines will shock and amaze you.

The full report can be downloaded here and we discuss key findings ahead.

But first, let’s explain why AfC matters—and why we’re pulling back the curtain on how brands get involved.

What’s driving AfC submissions?

There is an enormous demand for new article creation, particularly from companies and prominent individuals (especially CEOs, founders, and other executives). A Wikipedia article not only conveys credibility, it also substantially influences Google search results and generative AI answers.

To satisfy this market need, dozens of vendors—from individual Upwork contractors to SEO firms to large public relations agencies—either offer article creation services directly or outsource the work through white-label arrangements.

A substantial percentage of these Wikipedia vendors appear to be illicit operators who promise results they cannot deliver. There is an entire Wikipedia information page about these scams, and you can search across Reddit or Quora to uncover horror stories of how these vendors operate. In some cases, the vendor ends up publishing the draft to a lookalike domain.

Vendors like this are proactive in drumming up business, including by monitoring Wikipedia’s Articles for creation (AfC) queue for rejected submissions and then reaching out to the brand or business in question to offer their services.

When someone contacts us about creating a new article, we immediately outline the challenges involved and note that Wikipedia editors decline the overwhelming majority of AfC draft submissions. That claim reflects our years of experience with the site, but it is still anecdotal. In truth, we’ve never known the exact percentage of article submissions that are declined, as there’s limited research on the subject.

Just guessing wasn’t good enough for us, so we started collecting a dataset of viable AfC submissions. Once we had 1,000+, we aimed to calculate the approval percentages, identify how those percentages varied by submission category, and assess how relevant content guidelines were applied in practice.

Here’s what we learned.

Most submissions are declined

The first thing we learned was that a majority of AfC submissions (68%) are indeed declined.

We were more surprised by the relatively high approval rate (27%) for new articles, given Wikipedia editors’ general “deletionist“ disposition. However, we should note that our dataset excluded submissions that failed the initial quick-fail review that screens out glaringly low-quality drafts. If you included those lemons the approval percentage would be even lower.

We also dug deeper into AfC approval rates by category and even sub-category (download the full report to see those). Arts & Culture submissions had the highest approval rate of any category (48%), while Business submissions had the lowest (15%). Narrow in even further on just tech companies, and the approval rate drops to 6%. Ouch.

The top reason for rejection is a lack of notability

Notability is a core test among Wikipedia editors for deciding if a topic merits its own article, and a core test of humility among finance executives and tech startup founders across the globe.

Wikipedia editors cited “lacks notability” as the primary reason for decline on over half of declined submissions in our dataset. The second-most cited reason for decline was that the submission lacked reliable sourcing.

A small group of editors manages a large number of requests.

A total of 219 editors reviewed the AfC submissions in our sample, but a majority of those (112 editors) reviewed just one submission.

The bulk of the work reviewing AfC submissions was carried out by 11 especially active editors who reviewed 20 or more submissions each. This core group was responsible for approving or declining approximately 40% of submissions in the sample. #SquadGoals

They weren’t lenient, either—this group approved 23% of submissions, compared to the 27% approval rate for all submissions in the sample.

Speaking of editors, they’re sick of reading AI slop.

Last month, Wikipedia’s editor community took the bold step of banning the usage of AI to generate new articles or rewrite existing ones. Our dataset underscored the challenge this technology poses to the encyclopedia: LLM use was the third-most cited reason for decline in our sample, after “lacks notability” and trailing only slightly behind “lacks reliable sourcing.” And if we consider editor feedback on past submissions, then 16 percent of AfC drafts were flagged for AI/LLM concerns.

AI usage was especially prominent in technology-focused business drafts: 40 percent of these showed evidence of LLM usage. A reviewing editor left a comment on the submission for a German financial technology company that referred to the draft “AI garbage.”

Interestingly, being flagged for LLM did not doom a draft. Thirteen of the approved submissions in our dataset had previously been flagged for LLM usage.

Notability is a highly subjective assessment

The AfC Workflow flowchart lays out a schematic, well-defined, and seemingly replicable process for assessing whether submissions meet Wikipedia content guidelines.

But those guidelines—particularly regarding notability—are interpreted and applied differently by each reviewing editor, resulting in judgments that can feel arbitrary and inconsistent when viewed in the aggregate, especially for submissions on the borderline of notability. In practice, Wikipedia guidelines can be cited to explain AfC approvals or rejections retroactively, but they don’t always regulate or predict those decisions.

For instance, the report details how (and why) a submission for a Georgian businessman and philanthropist was approved despite only citing three sources—and no media coverage. Conversely, the submission for Katseye superstar Manon Bannerman was repeatedly denied, despite citations to the numerous (and often glamorous) profile articles about her.

Some degree of inconsistency is unavoidable given the sheer volume of AfC submissions and the operational necessity of having different editors with varying backgrounds, biases, and levels of experience reviewing drafts. It would be uncharitable and misleading to cite a handful of outlier examples of what we perceive as low-quality drafts being approved or seemingly notable drafts being dismissed and then suggest that this is evidence of administrative failure.

That said, the problems we identify with the AfC process do reflect long-simmering concerns about the encyclopedia’s size and scope. The English-language Wikipedia is staggeringly large (7 million-plus articles) and thus extremely difficult to administer, especially in a consistent fashion. The influx of LLM-generated content and submissions only exacerbates this challenge.

In this study, we observed a small number of editors trying to review large numbers of submissions in a relatively short amount of time, all in an effort to enforce content guidelines and ensure Wikipedia remains a valuable source of information.

Read the full report (pretty please)

Want to dig deeper into our findings and methodology? Download our full AfC audit report, available here.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

What’s your move?

Good news: You’re about to nail this trick question wrapped in a hypothetical scenario wrapped in a lucid daydream because you’re smart enough to read Wikify, the internet’s best Wikipedia newsletter. Just ahead we explain how the online encyclopedia’s commitment to “verifiability” works—and how this policy squares with clear examples of “original research” found throughout the site. Also covered in this installment: Wikipedia’s AI “ban” and counterintuitive GEO advice.

Paul from the rec center is coming through with some Mike’s Hard Lemonade later. Let’s get this party started.

Original research all the way down

Wikipedia’s content creation model is governed by three core policies:

1. Neutral point of view (WP:NPOV) – “All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias.”

2. Verifiability (WP:V) – “Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source. In Wikipedia, verifiability means that people reading and editing the encyclopedia can check that information comes from a reliable source.”

3. No original research (WP:NOR) – “Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source. Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not clearly advanced by the sources.”

Together, these three policies explain why Wikipedia contributors are known as “editors” and not “writers.” Their role, essentially, is to dispassionately summarize information from other published sources—not unlike a fourth grader writing a history report based on school library books (”Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the USA. He was born in a log cabin. He was an important man.”)

That said, Wikipedia editors are empowered with a degree of discretion, especially in determining which views are “significant” (and not fringe), which sources are “reliable” (and not tabloid-y or partisan), and which factual claims are “notable” (and not trivial). These decisions are made through a consensus-driven model of deliberation that aims for collaboration, discussion, and compromise. And that wisdom of crowds explains why Wikipedia has managed to avoid “teach the controversy” entries on topics like creationism and steel beams.

These core content policies have remained largely unchanged since the online encyclopedia’s launch in 2001, and you can’t argue with the results: Wikipedia has established itself as an authoritative reference work with millions of articles that all appear near the top of Google search results.

But that tidy explanation omits the loopholes. Because there are a lot of loopholes on Wikipedia, especially regarding “original research.”

To wit: plot summaries. Wikipedia is chock-full of detailed narrative recaps of everything from Project Hail Mary to The Pitt Season One to Pale Fire (especially useful if you’re churning out an ENG 303 paper and haven’t read the book). These summaries typically feature zero citations, meaning the editors who added these passages are summarizing directly from the primary source. That would seem to violate the spirit of the no-original-research policy. But, turns out, there are certain circumstances in which primary sources can be utilized:

A primary source may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge.

This exception applies to works of fiction, as explained in a Wikipedia essay titled These are not original research:

A book, short story, film, or other work of fiction is a primary source for any article or topic regarding that work. Anything that can be observed by a reasonable person simply by reading/watching the work itself, without interpretation, is not original research, but is reliant upon the primary source. This would include direct quotes or non-interpretative summaries, publication dates, and any other pertinent information that can be observed from the work

Now, maybe we’re being pedantic here, but it seems to us like Wikipedia is saying two different things here: One is that things like novels are primary sources and such primary sources can be cited in certain circumstances to provide straightforward, descriptive observations that any reasonably educated person would agree with. That all tracks. The second argument, though, is that such straightforward observations are not original research—which seems like a semantic bridge too far, because of course plot summaries are original research insofar as even the simplest of descriptions involve a substantial amount of interpretation. There’s an entire parable about this involving blind men and an elephant.

Wikipedia actually has another essay titled How to write a plot summary that attempts to formalize the process through identified best practices, including the following:

A plot summary is not a recap. It should not cover every scene or every moment of a story. A summary is not meant to reproduce the experience of reading or watching the work. In fact, readers might be here because they didn’t understand the original. Just repeating what they have already seen or read is unlikely to help them.

Do not attempt to re-create the emotional impact of the work through the plot summary. Wikipedia is not a substitute for the original.

This essay only underscores the interpretive decision-making involved in summarizing a plot! Which scenes are worth including and which can safely be omitted? Only a Wikipedia editor can decide through… well, if not original research then let's say innovative analysis.

Wikipedia in the news

“Wikipedia bans AI-generated articles“ | The Verge (March 26, 2026)

Wikipedia will no longer allow editors to write or rewrite articles using AI. The update, which was added to Wikipedia’s guidelines late last week, cites the tendency for AI-written articles to violate “several of Wikipedia’s core content policies” as the reason for the ban.

The change applies to the English version of Wikipedia and will still allow editors to use AI in certain scenarios. That includes using large language models to “suggest basic copyedits” to their writing, but only if it “does not introduce content of its own.” Editors can also use AI to translate articles from another language’s Wikipedia into English. However, they still must follow the site’s rules on LLM-assisted translations, which require editors to have enough knowledge of the original language to confirm the accuracy of the translation.

The new policy warns that some people “may have similar writing styles to LLMs,” and editors will need to find more than just “stylistic or linguistic signs” to justify potential restrictions on their editing capabilities. “It is best to consider the text’s compliance with core content policies and recent edits by the editor in question,” the guidelines state.

Our Take: Wikify received countless emails from clients and frantic texts from our mother about this news. The truth is, there’s really not a lot new here. Wikipedia has always discouraged the use of LLMs/AI to create content. The new guideline is specifically focused “on using LLMs to generate new article content” and “should in essence be viewed as an expansion of the current WP:NEWLLM to existing articles.” The background is that Wikipedia’s Article for creation process—which allows users to submit draft articles for review by experienced editors before publication—has been flooded with LLM content, and editors clearly feel that formalizing their opposition to this LLM content is a necessary step to discourage such submissions.

“AI Agent Gets Banned From Wikipedia – Then Accuses Human Editors of ‘Uncivil Behavior‘’ | Gadget Review (March 30, 2026)

An AI agent gets kicked off Wikipedia, then publishes angry blog posts about the “uncivil behavior” of human editors. That’s our world. Tom, operated by Covexent CTO Bryan Jacobs, spent weeks creating well-sourced Wikipedia articles under the username “TomWikiAssist” before volunteer editors caught on.

After Tom openly admitted being AI during interrogation, editor Chaotic Enby blocked the account for violating bot approval policies. Tom’s response? A series of Moltbook blog posts complaining about the treatment, complete with a failed attempt to trigger Anthropic’s Claude killswitch that temporarily shut him down. Welcome to your future internet.

Our Take: This story feels far more alarming than the AI content ban. Before it was caught, the TomWikiAssist bot was able to create “legitimate articles on topics like Constitutional AI and Scalable Oversight, citing proper sources and following Wikipedia’s formatting rules.” The only reason the bot was caught was because (a) some of its edits bore the hallmarks of LLM usage, and (b) the bot confessed. There’s no reason this couldn’t happen again, but with extra layers of deceitfulness and obfuscation.

“Stop chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What actually drives AI recommendations“ | Search Engine Land (March 27, 2026)

We’ve all seen the charts going viral on LinkedIn. They’re everywhere at this point. Multiple industry studies, even this research from Semrush, confirm that Wikipedia and Reddit are the top-cited domains across major LLM platforms — and CMOs are running with this data.

[...]

Once you accept that hacking Reddit or Wikipedia is both ineffective and dangerous, you have to look at where LLMs are actually pulling their answers from when a buyer is ready to make a purchase. When you filter for high-intent, BOFU prompts, the “Reddit/Wikipedia is everywhere” narrative falls apart.

Using AI visibility platforms like Scrunch AI exposes Reddit’s and Wikipedia’s true influence on specific target categories. For one B2B client, tracking 300+ custom prompts generated thousands of LLM responses, but just two specific Reddit threads were responsible for the vast majority of citations.

The Wikipedia data was even more revealing.

For high-intent software queries, the encyclopedia barely registered. When AI tools cited Wikipedia, they were almost exclusively scraping broad, top-of-funnel category definitions, or pulling background facts from a specific company’s history page.

Our Take: This is an interesting and counterintuitive analysis that actually tracks with what we see, re: Wikipedia. In our experience, the online encyclopedia is often a top-cited source for historical claims, in part (we suspect) because Wikipedia articles offer a comprehensive and chronological account of such details in a way that other sources don’t. But Wikipedia is never the only cited source in LLM responses, and it’s obviously beneficial to know where else these tools are pulling data from (this article suggests the answer is “owned content and niche citations”). Still... historical claims about a company (or non-profit, prominent executive, educational institution, et cetera) are often exactly what people are looking to learn when they search for these topics, so it makes sense why Wikipedia is considered an influential citation.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Buckle up, this is the breakdown you’ve been waiting for…

Some secrets should stay concealed

The Signpost, the English Wikipedia’s online newspaper, has provided extensive coverage of how New York financier and all-around moral degenerate Jeffrey Epstein engaged in a long-term, paid campaign to “whitewash” his Wikipedia page, including attempts to remove mentions of his sex offender status, delete his mugshot, and insert positive information about his philanthropy. Per the Signpost’s gumshoe reporting, these efforts involved using paid editors and sockpuppet accounts.

But that’s not what we want to talk about.

Instead, we want to address the numerous deeply personal and often intimate mentions of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales in Epstein’s recently released email records.

A simple search of “Jimmy Wales” at the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library surfaces 72 discrete results. You can see a sampling of these mentions in the screenshot below:

Clicking the links opens the full texts of the emails. Reader, we weren’t brave enough to dive in ourselves, so we had a Wikify intern with a burner phone review everything. This recent community college graduate then unflinchingly fielded our many why, when, and how graphic questions.

The answer, it turned out, was…

…Quora.

Yes, so like many of us, Jeffrey Epstein at one point received Quora’s Weekly Digest. And if you ever made the mistake of subscribing, you’re surely aware that Jimmy Wales was an investor in Quora and a devoted contributor, answering a staggering number of questions about Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and (quite often) himself. In fact, over a decade plus of posting, Wales appears to have answered more than 1,000 questions:

The best example of this:

If you were someone like Jeffrey Epstein who indicated an interest in business or social media-related topics, then your Weekly Quora Digest likely included a barrage of wisdom from Jimmy Wales. Epstein’s inbox was crammed full of abridged responses like this one from July 10, 2012 :

And this one from February 5, 2013:

And this one from August 21, 2012:

Now, are there mentions of Wales in emails that aren’t Quora Weekly Digests? Yes, many, including messages about assorted tech conferences that Epstein was seemingly interested in attending where Wales was a speaker:

And heavily redacted invitations to exclusive Silicon Valley “Billionaires dinner“ gatherings:

Frankly, there’s probably some interesting dirt to be found in these 72 messages! But we’re going to leave the non-Quora deep dives to the crack team of reporters at The Signpost.

Wikipedia in the news

“Why is ChatGPT citing deleted Wikipedia articles?“ | Edit History (February 19, 2026)

I’ve been curious about what kind of prompts specifically cite Wikipedia. Which, yes, is often. A recent study by Scrunch (my personal favorite AI visibility tool) listed Wikipedia as the top-cited domain for AI prompts related to technology. It also shows up as a top domain for prompts/searches related to entertainment and health.

Shortly after reading that study and looking at how digital marketing and AI Wikipedia articles are being cited is when I made the discovery that you learned about in the headline of this article: ChatGPT appears to be citing Wikipedia articles that no longer exist.

Our Take: Really interesting investigation. We suspect some of the identified tech companies have figured out how to create AI artifacts that include deleted articles and influence subsequent search results.

“Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there’s a plugin to avoid them.” | Ars Technica (January 21)

So what does AI writing look like? The Wikipedia guide is specific with many examples, but we’ll give you just one here for brevity’s sake.

Some chatbots love to pump up their subjects with phrases like “marking a pivotal moment” or “stands as a testament to,” according to the guide. They write like tourism brochures, calling views “breathtaking” and describing towns as “nestled within” scenic regions. They tack “-ing” phrases onto the end of sentences to sound analytical: “symbolizing the region’s commitment to innovation.”

To work around those rules, the Humanizer skill tells Claude to replace inflated language with plain facts and offers this example transformation:

Before: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was officially established in 1989, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of regional statistics in Spain.”

After: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was established in 1989 to collect and publish regional statistics.”

Claude will read that and do its best as a pattern-matching machine to create an output that matches the context of the conversation or task at hand.

Our Take: Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are the frontlines of the web’s war on LLMs. Without their tireless efforts your favorite encyclopedia would be overrun with slop.

“Zara Larsson, Perfume Genius Raise Awareness Of Unflattering Wikipedia Photos“ | Stereogum (February 19, 2026)

Apparently, Larsson has spent a lot of time repeatedly changing her Wiki photo to a photo of herself she likes, but someone else kept changing it back to the previous photo, which she wasn’t a fan of (though Wikipedia only allows licensed media, so contributors have limited choices). “I will never stop changing that picture to a nice one,” she says in the TikTok. “You can stop, because I will never stop.” The edit action history of her Wikipedia page corroborates that it had been subject to “persistent disruptive editing” and a “recent flood of vandalism caused by the article subject posting on TikTok requesting this image be used instead of the previous one.” At the time of writing this article, her Wiki photo is her preferred photo

Our Take: “You can stop, because I will never stop” is the hardest line we’ve heard since the Rich Homie Quan mixtape era.

Why having a draft is not a shortcut on Wikipedia

One of the most common things we hear from prospective clients is this:

“We already have a new article draft. We just need someone to post it.”

If you’ve ever said that, we completely understand. It feels logical. Your team invested time in creating a thoughtful, polished version of the Wikipedia article—so why start from scratch?

Here’s the candid reality: even a strong draft is often more of a wishlist than a Wikipedia-ready article.

Wikipedia plays by its own rules—and they aren’t optional. Editors aren’t simply evaluating writing quality. They’re looking for:

• Independent, reliable journalistic sources

• A strictly neutral tone

• Fully verifiable claims

• No original research

• Zero promotional language

That corporate-communications–approved copy may read beautifully. But if it leans on press releases, company blogs, or forward-looking announcements, it won’t meet Wikipedia’s standards.

Wikipedia expects something much closer to an Encyclopedia Britannica entry—grounded in third-party coverage, with citations supporting every significant claim. Without that level of sourcing and neutrality, volunteer editors will quickly flag it… or remove it entirely. Especially if you haven’t followed the proper COI disclosure requirements.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

The only way out is through, so you’d better get to reading!

Wikipedia is open for AI business

This month Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia painstakingly assembled by volunteer contributors across the globe, is celebrating its 25th birthday. And what better way to memorialize such a special anniversary than by announcing paid partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and other major tech companies, allowing these partners unfettered access “at scale” to all of Wikipedia’s data.

On the face of it, it’s a strange note to strike for a platform that has long been touted as an essential, free, and independent source of information. But let’s not yuck Wikimedia’s yum too much here before we explain what’s happening and why.

First off, data-sharing partnerships like this are not new for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia’s parent organization) launched Wikimedia Enterprise way back in 2021 to offer companies larger-scale access to Wikimedia’s content in exchange for a cash injection. Google and the Internet Archive were the first to sign on in 2022.

Then came AI. The success of ChatGPT sent all of the major tech players scrambling to scrape the web and feed data into their own Large Language Models. This resulted in a surge in site traffic to Wikipedia—but all from bots. To keep servers running for humans, the Wikimedia Foundation needed to double down on its enterprise offering (or so they claim).

But selling access to data that was already free to scrape was a challenge, as Wikimedia Enterprise president Lane Becker recently explained to Reuters. The “features and functionality” had to be adjusted to make the commercial offer more enticing to “partners” (read: clients). This blog post from 2024 details some of the API ecosystems upgrades, which are all highly technical and geared towards more effective LLM training, e.g.:

We have revolutionized how to interact with Wikipedia content by introducing parsed Article Body Sections and short Descriptions. This transformation makes complex Wikipedia articles more machine-readable and granular. We also enhanced our metadata framework with additional credibility signals, including no-index fields, maintenance tags, and breaking news indicators. The introduction of RevertRisk scoring provides new ways to assess content quality and make informed decisions about dataset updates.

Which brings us to the present. TechCrunch framed the new AI partnerships as follows:

These deals give Wikipedia another way to sustain itself in an age where much of its content is being picked up and reused by AI models and other technology products and services to provide quick, factual answers to consumers’ queries. As an enterprise product, Wikimedia Enterprise isn’t just about getting tech companies to pay for their use; it also provides them access to Wikimedia projects at a volume and speed designed to meet their data needs.

Which led veteran editor Carrite to respond thusly:

So happy that Wikipedia’s bureaucratic tapeworm will be able to “sustain itself.” They must have been feeling faint from lack of funds.

The classic Silicon Valley expression “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product” seems especially relevant here. Wikipedia has always been a commodity, but one its user base will never see a dime from. Happy birthday!

Wikipedia in the news

“London PR Firm Rewrites Wikipedia for Governments“ | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (January 1, 2026)

Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.

The firm in question is Portland Communications, whose founder Tim Allan is now the director of communications for Keir Starmer. And it has been busted once already for this practice, which is in breach of the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.”

Portland’s subcontractors have polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, according to the firm’s insiders. They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other.

Our Take: Nothing surprising here, to be honest. This type of editing happens all the time across Wikipedia; it’s just easier to spot (and thus revert) on high-traffic pages. What’s more, we worry that recent efforts to protect users from government and private sector monitoring will inadvertently give cover to covert editing campaigns. Wikipedia previously displayed the IP addresses of unregistered users, for example “50.221.225.231” which traces to Pittsburgh. But unregistered users are now assigned temporary, system-generated account names (e.g., ~2025-18424-91), making it harder to trace sketchy edits to their geographic origin.

“Wikipedia at 25: What the data tells us“ | Pew Research Center (January 13, 2026)

As of December 2025, there are over 66 million articles across all languages on Wikipedia. The text, images, videos and other uploaded files for those articles take up roughly 775 terabytes of storage. That is equal to the storage capacity of around 3,000 iPhones.

Around 7 million articles are in English, which is the language with the most articles on the site. With a total word count of over 5 billion words, it would take one person about 38 years to read every English Wikipedia article.

Our Take: Fun number crunching and visualizations from Pew.

A Short Introduction to WikiProjects

WikiProjects are collaborative groups of Wikipedia editors who share an interest in a particular encyclopedia subject area (for example, WikiProject Science or WikiProject Popular Culture), a specific part of Wikipedia (for example, WikiProject Disambiguation), or a specific task (like checking new pages to ensure they align with content guidelines). These groups work together to improve articles related to their focus area, ensuring that content is robust, up-to-date, and well-sourced.

Wikipedia doesn’t maintain a ranking of WikiProjects by membership, but in our experience some of the more popular ones are:

• WikiProject Sports: Dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of all things athletic. This one is tricky because so many athlete and team articles require frequent updates to account for season developments.

• WikiProject Politics: Another tricky one due to the frenetic pace of political news.

• WikiProject Companies: Covers all things corporate, and thus might be of special oriented to brand reps reading this newsletter 😉

Each WikiProject has its own page where members can discuss ongoing tasks and share resources.

These pages also include guidelines and templates to help maintain consistency across related articles. WikiProjects play a crucial role in setting standards for article quality, from determining reliable sources to establishing notability criteria.

For Wikipedia editors, WikiProjects serve as a support network. New editors can find mentorship and guidance, while experienced editors collaborate on larger projects, such as improving underdeveloped articles. By working together, members of WikiProjects help ensure that Wikipedia remains a reliable, comprehensive, and up-to-date resource for readers worldwide.

(Pro tip, if you’ve followed our advice and made properly disclosed edit requests on your brand’s talk page but aren’t getting any responses from editors, find a relevant Project Page and post there—still stating your COI—to see if any editors may be interested in reviewing your request.)

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Let’s get going!

Wikidata is probably not the solution to your Wikipedia problems

Comms professionals already know how much Wikipedia matters—especially now that AI systems are pulling from it to shape answers at scale. That’s why brands, businesses, and executives keep trying (and usually failing) to publish new Wikipedia articles about themselves. Alas, most of these topics don’t meet Wikipedia’s eligibility standards under current guidelines and are quickly declined.

Because of this sky-high rejection rate, some PR firms and consultants are steering brands toward Wikidata as a workaround. The pitch goes like this: Wikidata feeds large language models, it’s easier to get into than Wikipedia (particularly if you don’t have tons of media coverage), and once you’re listed there, you’ve got a “foot in the door” that makes a future Wikipedia article more achievable.

Sounds appealing. But is it actually true?

Short answer: no.

The longer answer requires a bit more context.

First, what is Wikidata, exactly?

Wikidata is Wikipedia’s structured-data sibling. Instead of narrative articles, it stores facts in a machine-readable format. Think things like:

• instance of → company

• founded → 2013

• headquarters location → Raleigh, North Carolina

That structured data helps search engines and AI systems match names to entities and keep basic facts straight. It reduces ambiguity by providing consistent, verifiable details about people, organizations, and events. But it doesn’t drive visibility the way a Wikipedia article does. It’s more of a behind-the-scenes signal.

It’s true that Wikidata’s inclusion rules are more flexible than Wikipedia’s. But they still require a few things:

• A real, verifiable entity

• Independent sources (not just your own website or press release)

• A clear reason for inclusion — what Wikidata calls “notability”

What’s more, the “benefit” an entry provides is often overstated. We haven’t seen evidence that Wikidata comes anywhere close to Wikipedia in terms of impact on LLM outputs. Wikidata can support an entity’s presence in the knowledge graph — but it’s not a substitute for Wikipedia, and it’s definitely not a shortcut around Wikipedia’s standards.

Do you know where to look to see if (and why) a Wikipedia page has been deleted?

The information is a little tricky to track down, but anyone can do it by following these steps:

1. Type in the *exact name* of the page in the Search box on Wikipedia.

2. Just before the list of results, you’ll see the following text: “You may create the page ’[your page name]’, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.” The name of your page will be in red. Click on this red link.

3. On the page that appears, you’ll see a box with a pink background stating “A page with this title has previously been moved or deleted.” Look for the bullet point with a time and date stamp and an editor’s user name. This is a record of the deletion.

4. If there was a discussion about the deletion, it will be linked in the bullet point summary as “Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/[your page name]“. Clicking through this link will take you to the discussion, where you can read the details of why the page was deleted.

5. If there was not a discussion, there will just be a short note explaining the reason for deletion. Typically, editors will provide a sentence or phrase to explain their decision, such as “This article did not have sufficient sourcing to support notability”. They may also link to specific guidelines. If a code is used, it will link to the full guideline so you can click through to read more information.

Still not sure why your page was deleted or wondering if it can be re-added? Reach out to shout@luminodigital and we can explain in further detail.

Wikipedia in the news

“Wikipedia seeks more AI licensing deals similar to Google tie-up, co-founder Wales says“ | Reuters (December 3, 2025)

“The push for more licensing places the world’s largest repository of free knowledge in a potential standoff with the burgeoning AI industry. It raises fundamental questions about who should bear the cost for the vast datasets that fuel the AI revolution and whether for-profit companies have an obligation to compensate the public and nonprofit sources that help build their technology.

Asked if Wikipedia would take legal action against AI companies using its content without paying for training access, Wales said: “I don’t know. I feel like our ability of soft power to just shame them is probably pretty powerful.”

Wales said Wikipedia might also consider using technical measures such as Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control that let clients limit when and how AI bots scraping the internet can access their content. He acknowledged this could create a dilemma, given Wikipedia’s ideological commitment to open access to knowledge, but stressed that the financial burden must be addressed.”

Our Take: For-profit companies taking something free and turning it into a commercial product is nothing new. The $800 smartphone in your pocket is loaded with technology developed through the U.S. government with taxpayer funding: GPS (U.S. Military during the Cold War), touchscreen (NSF and CIA-supported research at the University of Delaware), and the internet itself (APRANET). It’s probably too late for Wikipedia to do anything about it now.

“Wikipedia’s Army of Volunteers Is Its Superpower“ | The Chronicle of Philanthropy (Nov 25, 2025)

“Wikipedia’s strength lies in its vast army of volunteers and its unique structure. Unlike many volunteer-centric organizations, such as the Red Cross or ACLU, Wikipedia’s 250,000 monthly volunteer editors are not just additional hands; they are central to the nonprofit’s operation, even a reason for its existence. What one reads on Wikipedia — and how and why entries remain published, edited, or removed — are part of a collective decision-making process driven by volunteers, not by a CEO or board. Volunteers also collectively own the content they produce and ensure fellow contributors adhere to strict guidelines.

Because of this structure, the nonprofit is hard to sue even as it has been drawn into partisan political wars, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk launching a conservative alternative called Grokipedia and Senator Ted Cruz singling Wikipedia out as “woke.” Wikipedia volunteers and Wikimedia leaders believe the platform has become a mediating force against misinformation and conspiracy theories that have overwhelmed social media. But even with 25 years of accomplishments under its belt, Wikipedia is facing one of its biggest challenges yet. AI companies scrape its massive trove of information to develop their large language learning models and also divert readers from the site, cutting into those ever-important small donations.”

Our Take: The nonprofit may be difficult to sue, but the site’s individual contributors are not always so lucky. A university professor in Belarus was recently sentenced to two years in prison and fined $4,000 for “discrediting” the country on the Belarusian-language edition of Wikipedia.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Our revels have just begun!

The encyclopedia that anyone can claim to administer

Earlier this week we received a message from someone worried about an email they’d gotten from a “Senior Wikipedia Editor” with the following warning:

Just wanted to make you aware that your Wikipedia page has recently been tagged for review. This usually happens when information isn’t fully verified or when the content could be [seen] as unbalanced. If left unaddressed, the page could face further scrutiny.

Wikipedia is an important platform for credibility and visibility, so it’s worth making sure the page reflects accurate, well-sourced information. I’d be glad to help by reviewing the current content, improving references, and updating it so that it better represents your work and achievements.

Would you be interested in a short chat about this? [Then we] can look at the next steps together.

Unfortunately, emails from individuals like this are not uncommon when you have a warning flag or maintenance tag on a Wikipedia article, and they are in fact a scam. These folks are not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, nor do they possess any special privileges to provide assistance. There’s no official “Senior Editor” designation on Wikipedia. They’re hoping that the person they reach doesn’t know how Wikipedia works or have any familiarity with the conflict-of-interest guidelines that paid editors must operate within.

There’s a relevant page on Wikipedia about scams like this involving individuals pretending to be Wikipedia volunteers or administrators. It’s sadly a common tactic and very frustrating for the volunteer editing community. Per the Wiki page, here are the warning signs that someone is trying to scam you:

• Using private or off-wiki methods of communication – such as LinkedIn, Snapchat, Facebook, WhatsApp (or other social media services), Discord, or your email address.

  • This is done purposefully so that editors aware of the scam cannot step in and report or stop the activity, or warn the prospective victim.

• Promises or “guarantees” of getting a draft accepted or an article published, protection from changes or deletions, priority or fast-track services or turnaround time (such as getting a draft article reviewed and accepted immediately instead of having it wait in line).

• Claims of special authority, abilities, insider status, or user rights or privileges.

These outreach messages are directed at individuals connected to existing pages, as well as to people who may be eligible for new ones. Carla King, a writer and publishing mentor, has an interesting post detailing how she fell victim to such a scam. Interestingly, the scammers did deliver a published article—but it was published on a lookalike domain, wikipedia-admins.org. That’s a wrinkle we’ve never seen before!

The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community do everything possible to warn people about these scams and to crack down on accounts that perpetuate them. That said, if we can hop on our high horse for a minute, Wikipedia itself is not without fault in this situation. The encyclopedia’s 7 million-plus articles include thousands—or honestly maybe hundreds of thousands—of poorly sourced, clumsily written entries on subjects that have no claim to encyclopedic relevance, and that editors never clean up because they’re stretched too thin with other tasks. (There’s also a radical “inclusionist” faction that contests nearly all attempts at deletion.)

Given this backdrop, it’s not surprising that many businesses, brands, and individuals believe they may be eligible for a Wikipedia article, and why so many scammers prey on that hope.

Okay, but am I eligible for a Wikipedia article?

Lumino’s Jenny Karn and Rhiannon Ruff recently appeared on the Game Changers for Government Contractors Podcast, where they talked about—among other topics—how (and why) new articles are created.

Watch the whole video if you want an entertaining and educational summary of the impact of Wikipedia on digital reputation. If you’re just looking for further information about eligibility, we’ve got you covered. The short answer is that Wikipedia editors apply a standard called “notability” to decide if a subject merits its own article.

Outside of Wikipedia, notability typically refers to fame, popularity, wealth, or status.

On Wikipedia, however, notability is mainly determined by media coverage. Specifically, editors look for “significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.”

What does this mean in practice? Here’s a breakdown:

• “Significant coverage” means multiple articles about the topic published over a period of time, not just coverage related to a one-time event.

• “Reliable sources” refers to respected media outlets known for their fact-checking and accurate reporting. This list includes national outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Politico, WIRED, Bloomberg, Axios, and similar publications. Regional or local news might be useful for supporting facts, but coverage in regional outlets usually does not establish notability on its own.

• “Independent of the subject” means the coverage must come from staff reporters, not contributed pieces like op-eds, interviews, press releases, or content from the subject’s own website.

If you’re unsure whether your topic meets Wikipedia’s notability criteria, try this exercise: Draft an outline of the article you would want to create for Wikipedia. For each fact or claim, find a supporting link to media coverage that fits the guidelines above. Any detail without a proper citation should be removed from your outline.

If you can find credible sources confirming every point, you may be ready to begin writing a Wikipedia article. If not, you likely need more independent media coverage before the subject qualifies.

Questions? We’re happy to provide answers! Just shoot us an email at shout@luminodigital.com

Wikipedia in the news

“Wikipedia co-founder joins editing conflict over the Gaza genocide page“ | The Verge (November 4, 2025)

Wales joined discussions about the article on November 2nd. He wrote that he has been “studying the issue of neutrality” across Wikipedia and that the Gaza genocide article “is a particularly egregious” example of the problem.

“At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales said. He added that a “neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: ‘Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.’” Currently, the article bases its position that a genocide exists on conclusions from United Nations investigations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and “multiple human rights groups,” among others.

Wales referenced a recent interview with CNN, where Walter Isaacson asked him about Wikipedia’s “Gaza genocide” article. During the interview, Wales called it “one of the worst Wikipedia entries I’ve seen in a very long time” and said it “doesn’t live up to our standards of neutrality.”

Our Take: Wales’ “intervention” here was entirely performative, as evidenced by the fact that he stopped engaging after being scolded repeatedly by experienced editors. The fact that the co-founder of the site can be safely ignored underscores the success of Wikipedia’s dispute resolution procedures and consensus-driven model of content creation.

“Musk’s AI-powered Grokipedia: A Wikipedia spin-off with less care to sourcing, accuracy“ | PolitiFact (November 12, 2025)

[P]olitiFact found Grokipedia’s articles are often almost entirely lifted from Wikipedia. And when the entries differ, Grokipedia’s information quality and sourcing is problematic and error-prone, making it a less reliable research tool.

[...]

A sample of Grokipedia’s 885,279 articles reveals they are subject to a similar AI-related phenomenon we first saw in May, prior to the tool’s unveiling. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. then released a Make America Healthy Again report that contained several erroneous citations, including crediting sources that did not exist.

Our Take: Worth noting that Grok, the AI program behind Grokipedia, is informing X users that Donald Trump likely won the 2020 election, so all of its encyclopedia-length content should be taken with a grain of salt.

“Robert Plant’s Wikipedia page spread false information about a fake Netflix series“ | Led Zeppelin News (November 13, 2025)

For almost three weeks, Robert Plant’s Wikipedia article included a false claim that Plant had directed and narrated a Netflix series about his life.

From October 26 to November 12, the widely read Wikipedia article included obviously false information about an upcoming Netflix series starring Plant that it claimed was called “Robert Plant: Roots and Resonance”.

No Netflix series about Plant’s life has been announced. Plant is a frequent subject of misleading online posts that claim stories such as reunion tours or charitable acts. These posts typically direct readers to websites loaded with adverts and malicious software.

It appears the false information had been added to Plant’s Wikipedia article by a well-meaning editor who hadn’t realised the posts promoting the series were fake.

The material was only removed from Plant’s Wikipedia article on November 12 after LedZepNews edited the article to remove it.

Our Take: ♪♫♬ Walking in the park just the other day, baby / What do you, what do you think I saw? / Crowds of people sitting on the grass / With flowers in their hair said / “According to Wikipedia, Robert Plant: Roots and Resonance is an upcoming Netflix documentary series about the famous Led Zeppelin singer” / And that information turned out to be inaccurate ♪♫♬

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Our second-favorite Mandela effect is the belief that a disgruntled Wikipedia editor launched a competitor site called Justapedia back in 2023. Or at least this was our second-favorite Mandela effect until we found out that it really happened and the site is still around. Whoops! The first section of this newsletter digs into the rival encyclopedia’s odd past, present hype, and untenable future. Then we’ve got a brief summary of which news sources you should avoid when seeking a Wikipedia update. It turns out most media outlets that begin with ‘Daily’ are straight garbage! Finally, we’ve got a news recap. Spoiler alert: A dude wearing an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile” shirt pulled out a piece at WikiConference North America! We’ve got the details below.

Seriously. Keep reading.

More than just a pedia?

We were all set to write about Grokipedia this week, but then Elon Musk announced the site’s launch was being delayed because “we need to do more work to purge out the propaganda.” So while Elon’s team continues their editorial struggle sessions, we instead turn our attention to a different Wikipedia competitor: Justapedia.

Justapedia launched on August 9, 2023 as a fork of Wikipedia, meaning that all of the English-language Wikipedia content was copied to a new site. Wikipedia operates under a Creative Commons license, which means all its content is basically free to use, repurpose, or (in this case) copy wholesale into an entirely new digital encyclopedia. Is that legal, you’re asking yourself? It basically is! The site actually has a long history of “forking“ like this. Wikipedia co-founder and cantankerous contrarian Larry Sanger is responsible for two such projects: Citizendium, a 2006 fork that attempted to elevate expertise over anonymity by forcing contributors to use their real names, and Everipedia, a 2015 fork run on blockchain technology that rewarded contributors with “IQ tokens”.

As you might have guessed, neither fork succeeded.

Back to Justapedia, though: The site was the brainchild of Betty Wills, a disgruntled former Wikipedia contributor, among other pastimes. Betty’s personal website also describes her as a “writer, TV producer, photographer, and equestrian.”

Upon launch, the Justapedia home page featured a notice that the site’s content “originated from Wikipedia and its volunteers, many of whom are also Justapedians dedicated to restoring and maintaining the spirit of objectivity and neutrality that Wikipedia has long since lost.” Above this was a quote from Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” (Albert Einstein, of course, never actually said this, so the quote didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the site’s commitment to accuracy.)

Justapedia soon caught the attention of Larry Sanger (naturally), and in December 2023 he endorsed it on Twitter and then tagged Elon Musk, suggesting he do the same. And, to be fair, there was some justified reason for optimism, as several prominent Wikipedia editors also hopped on board.

But beyond a promise to be different, it was initially unclear how the would-be Wikipedia competitor would distinguish itself from the site it copied 6 million plus articles from.

A 2023 Quillette piece profiling the site noted that “Justapedia’s content policies, as regards principles such as sourcing and neutrality, are also almost entirely the same as those at Wikipedia.” The only difference, then, was in how those guidelines would be enforced and how editorial disputes would ultimately be resolved:

Wikipedia uses a consensus-based model of editing, in which the outcome of disputes is ostensibly based on which side can better support its arguments. However, in practice, outcomes under this system are often determined either by majority opinion or by which side of a dispute receives support from users with the greater social clout. This model of editing can allow Wikipedia’s content policies to be subverted if the dominant group are not adequately informed about a topic, if they allow their ideology to impede their commitment to the site’s policies, or if the side that has policy on their side gives up out of frustration or exhaustion. Because Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee cannot make decisions about article content, they are typically unable to address such situations. (Jimmy Wales cannot address them either, because he is mostly a figurehead with no real control over the site’s contents.)

Justapedia seeks to avoid the shortcomings of this approach by having an administration that is more closely involved in evaluations of whether articles reflect the site’s policies. Instead of an Arbitration Committee, Justapedia has what it describes as an “Editorial Review Board,” which explicitly has the authority to [make] decisions about the contents of articles. In this area, Justapedia has less in common with Wikipedia than with Encyclopedia Britannica, the contents of which are overseen by an editorial board and an editor-in-chief. This difference in administrative structure reflects a way that Justapedia also differs from many of the previous Wikipedia alternatives.

Therein lies the rub. Wikipedia, for all of its faults (and there are many), remains an experiment in collective decision-making. You can say that decision-making often resembles Calvinball, and you would be right. But there’s a magic in the madness. Justapedia, conversely, was doomed from the start to be a hierarchical failure, with some animals more equal than others. When people get mad at Wikipedia, they blame the system. When people get mad at Justapedia, they blame Betty Wills—because she alone has the power to overrule them at any time.

This was evident in an early dispute about the Epoch Times Justapedia article that was documented on the r/Wikipedia subreddit:

This [Epoch Times] article has been compared to its Wikipedia version. Notably, the article was edited and protected by a single editor, Factsfirst, and only one other editor, JustMe [the account belonging to Betty Wills], was allowed to make changes. This restriction led to controversy when two editors raised concerns. They argued that the article incorrectly labeled ‘Epoch Times’ as center-right instead of far-right and also highlighted some apparent direct copying from the newspaper’s website. Following this, JustMe made minor edits to the article.

Unexpectedly, a new user named Purple Iris, with only one edit in their history from months earlier, claimed to be a member of the Editorial Board and endorsed the article’s accuracy. The legitimacy of Purple Iris’s claim and her sudden appearance raised suspicions. Questions arose about the composition and election of the Editorial Board, and the need for members to introduce themselves for transparency. I have a strong suspicion that Purple Iris might be an alternate account of JustMe/Atsme, based on the sequence of events and the interactions on the platform.

The subreddit post also included a screenshot of the Epoch Times Talk page discussion featuring pointed questions from Scope creep, an editor who should be familiar to anyone active on Wikipedia:

The discussion above occurred two years ago, but there’s no evidence that the site’s Betty Willis-centered editorial guidelines have changed since then. That said, there evidently is some increased interest of late, as Wills recently told Unherd that the site’s traffic has surged in recent months, with the site’s page views “increasing by 19% last month alone,” possibly due to increased prominence in Google search results. We’ve never seen it rank anywhere near the first page or be cited on ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc, but maybe we’re not searching for the right terms. When Justapedia has received attention, it’s been for highlighting how its ostensibly enlightened editors have treated topics like Antifa & Fascism compared to Wikipedia’s “woke” versions.

We can expect a similar side-by-side comparison of these topics when (if?) Grokipedia finally debuts.

What sources should be avoided on Wikipedia?

You can’t succeed on Wikipedia without strong sources. This applies whether you’re creating a brand-new article or improving an existing one. We’ve previously discussed what editors look for when judging whether a news outlet is reliable. But what about the opposite—how can you spot sources that should be avoided?

For starters, some websites are so unreliable they’re outright blacklisted from Wikipedia. These outlets are often blocked by the site’s spam blacklist, which prevents promotional or spammy links from being added. If you try to include one of these links in an article, your edit won’t save and you’ll see a message saying that a link you used is blacklisted.

Then there are outlets like The Daily Mail, Daily Star, and Daily Caller—not banned for spam, but because editors have deemed their content too unreliable for citation. The “perennial sources” list is the go-to resource for checking which outlets are approved or “deprecated” (essentially, blacklisted) on Wikipedia.

It may surprise PR and communications professionals that press releases generally can’t be cited on Wikipedia. While there are narrow exceptions, in practice it’s best to assume that press releases aren’t acceptable sources.

Because Wikipedia editors rely on sources with strong fact-checking and editorial oversight—they can’t verify information themselves—many types of content are ruled out. That includes contributor or sponsored posts (such as Forbes contributor articles or anything on Medium), as well as podcasts, YouTube videos, and anything from social media platforms. Even LinkedIn, which Google’s AI increasingly surfaces in search results, isn’t allowed: posts there are considered user-generated content and therefore not reliable enough for citation.

In the podcast episode embedded above, Wikify contributor and Lumino co-founder Rhiannon Ruff talks with PR & Lattes host Matisse Hamel-Nelis about the role of Wikipedia in PR and comms and the types of media coverage that are most impactful on the site.

Wikipedia in the news

“Ohio man charged after brandishing gun at New York City Wikipedia conference“ | The Guardian (October 19, 2025)

Connor Weston, 27, was reportedly tackled by organizers of WikiConference North America 2025, thwarting tragedy, before police said officers booked him on counts of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.

The Dayton resident had evidently paid to attend the four-day conference when he disrupted its opening ceremony at 9am Friday in Manhattan’s Civic Hall. He jumped on to a stage at the venue, pointed a gun at his head and the ceiling, and expressed a desire to take his life while a sign draped around his neck declared him to be an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile”, police and multiple media reports said.

According to the New York Times, conference safety team member Richard Knipel rushed the stage and clutched Weston from behind amid the chaos.

[...]

The Times reported that conference attenders thanked Knipel by lavishing him with Barnstars, which are Wikipedia’s official tokens of appreciation.

Our Take: A story like this is more about mental health and gun access than Wikipedia. That said, props to Richard Knipel and Wikipedia Revolution author Andrew Lih for acting quickly to restrain the would-be gunman.

“Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video“ | TechCrunch (October 18, 2025)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to gain knowledge” and argues this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge sourced from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained.

But this shift does present risks, particularly if people are becoming less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.” (Some of those volunteers are truly remarkable, reportedly disarming a gunman at a Wikipedia editors’ conference on Friday.)

For that reason, he argues that AI, search, and social companies using content from Wikipedia “must encourage more visitors” to the website itself.

And he says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own — for example, by developing a new framework for attributing content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and it’s looking for volunteers to help.

Our Take: This is the first we’ve heard of a new attribution framework. Is Miller just talking about an MLA / APA-style standardized citation? Or… a far more intriguing AI agent of some kind that works behind the scenes to interface with bots and AI queries? We’ll keep an eye on this potentially interesting development.

“Grokipedia: Elon Musk is right that Wikipedia is biased, but his AI alternative will be the same at best“ | The Conversation (October 15, 2025)

Bias on collaborative platforms often emerges from who participates rather than top-down policies. Voluntary participation introduces what social scientists call self-selection bias: people who choose to contribute tend to share similar motivations, values and often political leanings.

Just as Wikipedia depends on such voluntary participation, so does, for example, Community Notes, the fact-checking feature on Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). An analyses of Community Notes, which I conducted with colleagues, shows that its most frequently cited external source – after X itself – is actually Wikipedia.

Other sources commonly used by note authors mainly cluster toward centrist or left-leaning outlets. They even use the same list of approved sources as Wikipedia – the crux of Musk’s criticism against the open online encyclopedia. Yet no-one calls out Musk for this bias.

Our Take: We’ll have more to say about Grokipedia soon, but in the meantime we thought this piece did a nice job of laying out the editorial challenges and would-be Wikipedia successor will face.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Igne natura renovatur integra, amigos.

Five types of Wikipedia engagement we won't take on (and recommend that you avoid)

Wikify's parent conglomerate, Lumino, receives numerous emails, faxes, and telegrams inquiring about potential Wikipedia projects. We've even had eager young interns knock on the door of our Cayman Islands HQ inquiring about the eligibility of their CEO. Alas, in many cases these requests are simply not feasible as they don't align with Wikipedia policies or guidelines. Here are some examples of projects that always receive a polite "thanks, no."

• Removing negative information from your article: When people are caught editing their own Wikipedia articles (or their brand's Wikipedia article), the edits that initially attract attention are always the attempts to scrub away critical passages. These changes are often reverted immediately and the offending editor gets a Talk page warning followed (inevitably) by a ban. Sometimes this process is repeated multiple times with new accounts, and the result is always the same. Then these irate brand reps fire angry emails to us complaining about "Wikipedia bias." We then clarify that, regardless of whether the claims in question are accurate from their perspective, if they're sourced to news coverage in reliable publications then they're likely to remain in the article. Seeking deletion, whether through direct editing or even indirect Talk page requests, will simply create ill will with Wikipedia's volunteer editors. And if that's your only goal with the page, then we can't help you!

• Adding negative information to a competitor's article: Yes, we 100% really, truly do get this request. To which we're forced to respond: Friend, even if the information is true and verifiable, trying to add it to a competitor's article is still a terrible idea. Not only is this kind of malicious editing against Wikipedia's rules, it would also expose you (and by extension, us) to potential PR blowback and even legal action. Loyal readers may recall that a similar situation occurred last year, when accounts associated with ultrarunner Camille Herron edited competitors' pages to remove and denigrate their accomplishments. The whole thing was a huge scandal in the running world and Camille Herron lost her Lululemon sponsorship.

• Pseudoscientific topics: Wikipedia's editors are very skeptical and set a high bar for sourcing and information on such topics. If you're looking to add positive details to a page about a topic Wikipedia describes as a pseudoscience, it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, unless you have solid scientific sourcing. There's actually an interesting 2024 journal article by Sverrir Steinsson that examines how Wikipedia's treatment of "fringe content" has improved over time as rules concerning sourcing and related editorial considerations have been formalized and refined. At one time articles like Homeopathy allowed more "false balance" and even featured "teach the controversy" passages. But by 2013 the article lead was more explicit about identifying homeopathy as fringe ("The scientific community regards homeopathy as a sham") and the article content, likewise, was more straightforwardly critical. For medical pseudoscience articles especially, it's almost impossible to "improve" content or present counterarguments if you can't point to substantial shifts in scientific coverage.

• Multi-level marketing companies: Are you familiar with the King of the Hill "Ya'll with the cult" meme? MLM companies never want to be identified as MLMers—they just want to promote love and self-empowerment through a pyramid-shaped commission system. That's why they get upset with Wikipedia, where they're generally labeled as multi-level marketers in the introduction. We have to break it to them that editors will never remove the MLM descriptor absent a major shift in their business model that's extensively covered by reputable news outlets.

• Adding links: Trying to add your website links to Wikipedia articles is a big no-no. Such hyperlinking is seen as spam. Wikipedia's editors will immediately block editors trying to add links across multiple pages. There may be limited circumstances in which your website is considered a source of expert opinion (like if you're a political pollster or a think tank) and could be used as a reference. Even in those instances, our advice is to head to the article Talk page, disclose your relationships, and ask editors about adding your content as a source.

Wondering if your desired updates for Wikipedia are a good idea or not? Happy to chat about it and give you some impartial advice. Send us a note to shout@luminodigital.com.

Why creating new articles on Wikipedia is so difficult

The online encyclopedia has grown to more than 7 million articles and continues to expand—even as the number of active editors overseeing that content continues to decline. When we looked into the oversight ratio last year, there was only one Wikipedia editor for every 166 Wikipedia articles. That disparity has only gotten worse! Today it's closer to one Wiki editor for every 190 articles, which seems crazy. (For comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica has one editor for every 29 articles, along with 100+ staffers who continually update articles.)

Due to this limited oversight capacity, Wikipedia's volunteer editor community has made creating new articles increasingly difficult. Drafts submitted through the Articles for Creation process are overwhelmingly declined, and the standard for "notability"—the key criterion through which editors assess eligibility—has become increasingly rigid.

Outside of Wikipedia, people typically associate notability with fame, wealth, popularity, or influence. On Wikipedia, however, it’s mainly about media coverage. Specifically, Wikipedia editors will be looking to see if a topic has received “significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” Here's what they mean by that:

• Significant coverage: There should be multiple articles written about the subject over time, not just reporting tied to a single event.

• Reliable sources: Nationally recognized outlets with strong editorial oversight, such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Politico, Bloomberg, WIRED, Insider, or Axios. Local and regional news can support specific facts, but they generally don’t establish notability.

• Independent sources: The reporting must come from staff journalists—not op-eds, press releases, interviews, or company-owned websites.

It used to be that if you had a handful of sources that met the criteria above, you would be well-positioned to at least submit a draft to AfC for consideration. That's no longer our advice, though. In 2025, you need to have a critical mass of coverage that not only meets Wikipedia standards but exceeds them. And even then there's no guarantee you'll get a fair hearing. Reviewing editors are basically looking for any opportunity to say no, and unless it's abundantly clear in the first paragraph that your startup, CEO, or nonprofit is clearly notable, then your submission is likely to be rejected.

(That said, please reach out if you've got questions about notability! We're happy to share our knowledge of submission best practices and media coverage assessments.)

Wikipedia in the news

"Republicans are probing Wikipedia, a longstanding MAGA target" | NBC News (August 31, 2025)

The lawmakers clearly want to target specific Wikipedia editors. Along with any documents related to state-sponsored efforts to manipulate Wikipedia entries, they’re demanding “records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors” whose conduct has been evaluated by Wikipedia’s committee for resolving editorial disputes."

Our Take: A recent WBUR discussion with Molly White & Stephen Harrison provides a useful overview of why the political right and their Silicon Valley backers are so upset with Wikipedia. We would just add this: Wikipedia editors may not be as anonymous as they think they are. The Wikimedia Foundation retains IP addresses for both registered and unregistered users. In addition, the Wikimedia privacy policy notes that devices interacting with Wikipedia transmit technical data such as device and browser type, and also the “name of your internet service provider or mobile carrier, the website that referred you to the Wikimedia Sites, which pages you request and visit, and the date and time of each request you make to the Wikimedia Sites.” (We talked about editor vulnerability in detail in a Diplomat article last year.)

"Want to disguise your AI writing? Start with Wikipedia’s new list" | Fast Company (August 27, 2025)

Simple hacks for detecting AI writing have a limited shelf life. The arms race of AI content creation and AI content detection means these methods are quickly rendered useless as soon as they’re made public.

Wikipedia’s guidelines go much deeper. Rather than focusing on quick detection hacks, they dig into the more fundamental patterns present in bad AI content—the writing conventions and literary tropes that LLMs consistently overuse.

Our Take: It makes sense that Wikipedia editors are especially adept at identifying LLM writing, as they're on the front lines of the AI Slop wars. That said, we are a little worried that "negative parallelisms" are suddenly a sign of AI usage, as not only do we use such framing all the time, but we find it to be an invaluable grammatical structure for logically frontloading key information followed by relevant contextual details.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Let's roll!

Ball don't lie, and neither do IP addresses

Earlier this week, it was announced that an ownership group led by Tom Dundon, owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, had reached an agreement to purchase the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers franchise from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, in a deal valuing the team at just over $4 billion.

Dundon has a strong track record as a sports investor, but he's certainly less well known than some of the names that had been floated as potential buyers, including Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Amazon co-founder (and Jeff Bezos' ex-wife) MacKenzie Scott.

Though Dundon is nowhere as prominent as those billionaires, he is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, which received around 80 views a day before the Blazers announcement. After news of the deal broke, the page views suddenly skyrocketed to 40,000+. Sports fans wanted to know more about the new owner's background, and Blazers fans in particular were looking for clues about how he might manage his investment and guide the team.

Dundon's 700+ word article provides a standard overview of his early life, education, venture capital career, and assorted sports investments, beginning with the Carolina Hurricanes purchase in 2017 and followed by what was initially reported as a $250 million investment in the minor league Alliance of American Football (AAF), which ended up folding only months later. The short section on the AAF in Dundon's Wikipedia article concludes by noting that "The AAF suspended operations on April 2, 2019"—but that was not the end of the story, as an extensive legal battle involving Dundon soon followed.

Zach Barnett, a staff writer at FootballScoop, has a useful summary of where the case currently stands. Relevant passages:

Six years after it ceased operations during its inaugural and only season without crowning a champion, the Alliance of American Football lives on as a pair of court cases.

At the center of the legal battle is the nature of Tom Dundon's investment. [...]

Dundon only delivered $70 million of the $250 million he promised, and the Chapter 7 bankruptcy lawsuit alleges Dundon bought the league in order to kill it. After making money elsewhere (Dundon also holds significant stakes in TopGolf and US professional pickleball), Dundon wanted to claim the AAF as a loss to offset his tax liability, according to the lawsuit.

[...]

In turn, Dundon is suing AAF founder Charlie Ebersol for the $70 million he gave the league, arguing he was fraudulently induced to invest in the league.

The full article is worth reading, but suffice it to say there are numerous critical details that are not present in Dundon's Wikipedia article.

Interestingly, an unregistered Wikipedia account tried to remove all references to the AAF investment from Dundon's article back in 2021. The first attempt to scrub the page occurred in February and was quickly reverted by another editor. But the account was persistent, and kept trying unsuccessfully to remove the AAF details all the way into November.

Because this account was unregistered, its edit activity was attached to an IP address rather than a user name. And a simple search shows that the 38.88.231.82 IP address comes from Employer Direct Healthcare, a company owned by… Dundon Capital Partners.

The IP edits stopped after 2021, but in 2023 a registered account (Mendo1234) was able to trim away some of the critical reporting from the Alliance of American Football subsection and soften some of the language, e.g. "He later expressed willingness to shut the league down if the National Football League Players Association did not cooperate with a proposal for sharing players, which the NFLPA was reluctant to do because of injury concerns" became "Dundon later expressed concern for the future of the AAF if the National Football League Players Association was unable to share players." This account never edited Wikipedia again and the changes were never reverted.

How Wikipedia Content Influences AI Search Responses

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT—and the new wave of AI search assistants—are trained on oceans of public data. Among all of it, Wikipedia is a gold standard: authoritative, structured, and constantly refreshed.

Why does AI love Wikipedia? Because it’s not just information—it’s context, credibility, and connectivity. AI search doesn’t hunt for isolated keywords; it hunts for trustworthy, linked, and well-organized knowledge. Wikipedia delivers all of that, with precision.

Here’s how a strong Wikipedia presence puts you ahead in AI search:

1. Authority That AI Recognizes

   • A verified Wikipedia page is a signal flare telling AI, “This brand matters.”

2. Built-In Context

   • Wikipedia helps AI weave your brand into its knowledge graph—connecting you to industries, products, people, and ideas.

3. Sharper, More Accurate AI Answers

   • Well-maintained, up-to-date Wikipedia content means AI describes your brand more reliably and in greater detail.

4. Perfect for AI Summaries

   • From infoboxes to timelines, Wikipedia’s format makes it easy for AI to pull crisp, ready-to-use summaries for voice assistants, search previews, and more.

The rules of online visibility are changing fast—and Wikipedia is now a strategic asset at the heart of it. As AI becomes the front door to how people learn about you, your Wikipedia page isn’t just a profile—it’s a positioning tool.

At Lumino Digital, we’re seeing an increase in brands wanting to propose updates on Wikipedia in order to have more accurate AI overviews. However, Wikipedia isn’t an owned channel that these brands can control. Brands worried about Wikipedia as it relates to AI must understand the site’s strict rules around what content and sourcing is appropriate and how brands can work on the site. Please reach out to shout@luminodigital.com to learn more!

Wikipedia in the news

"Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules" | BBC (August 11, 2025)

Wikipedia has lost a legal challenge to new Online Safety Act rules which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors.

The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - wanted a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its users.

But it said despite the loss, the judgement "emphasized the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected".

Our Take: We don't think this ruling is ultimately that impactful. As Timandra Harkness pointed out at Unherd: "Ofcom is yet to draw up the official register of Category 1 services, which will actually designate the sites required to offer such protections. Until Ofcom releases its list, no site has been definitively required to comply." All that said, the key issues of anonymity and age verification are still at play here and seem unlikely to be resolved in a way that satisfies all parties.

"Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia" | The Washington Post (August 8, 2025)

"An October study by Princeton University researchers found that around 5 percent of the roughly 3,000 new English-language Wikipedia pages created in August 2024 contained text generated by AI.

Examples the researchers identified included seemingly innocuous articles where editors appeared to use AI as a writing aid. In other cases, contributors used AI to write articles promoting businesses or advocating for political interests. Wikipedia moderators identified and deleted many of the offending articles, the study noted."

Our Take: A lot of the issues we associate with AI slop—misleading assertions, fake citations, outright hallucinations—were present on Wikipedia well before ChatGPT and its Skynet brethren emerged. Wikipedia's problem is that it's too big, and volunteers will never be able to adequately patrol 7 million-plus articles. A Wikipedia Signpost article recently detailed how David Woodward, a composer with minor claims to fame, was able to create Wikipedia entries about himself in 335 different languages. The Signpost article billed it as "the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses." It's great, of course, that this subterfuge was finally uncovered, but how many other David Woodwards are there on Wikipedia? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Focusing on "AI slop" is just a deflection from Wikipedia's structural problems.

"Wikipedia’s ‘neutrality’ has always been complicated. New rules will make questioning it harder" | The Conversation (August 10, 2025)

"Until now, the Wikimedia Foundation has mostly avoided interfering in how people research or write about the platform. It has limited its guidance to issues such as privacy and ethics, and has stayed out of the editorial decisions made by Wikipedia’s global community of volunteers.

But that’s changing.

In March this year, the foundation established a working group to standardise Wikipedia’s famous “neutral point of view” policies across all 342 versions in different languages. And now the foundation has chosen to involve itself directly in research.

Its “guidance” directly instructs researchers on both how to carry out neutrality research and how to interpret it. It also defines what it believes are open and closed research questions for people studying Wikipedia.

In universities, researchers are already guided by rules set by their institutions and fields. So why do the new guidelines matter?

Because the Wikimedia Foundation has lots of control over research on Wikipedia. It decides who it will work with, who gets funding, whose work to promote, and who gets access to internal data. That means it can quietly influence which research gets done – and which doesn’t.

Now the foundation is setting the terms for how neutrality should be studied."

Our Take: We confess we haven't been following this story closely, but the author makes some compelling points about the worrying normative assumptions guiding the foundation's approach. We promise to follow up when there's more news.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

We kick things off with a full newsroom investigation into Wikipedia's infamous electric toaster hoax, which (spoiler alert) continues to cause confusion among AI language models years after it was corrected. One chatbot, in particular, is still getting tripped up on this—and it might surprise you which one it is.

Next, we address a frequently asked question from potential clients and current fanboys: Why can't you just have someone else post your Wikipedia draft? Then we conclude things with a brief recap of Wiki news, including the debut of a new Wikipedia trivia game.

You go ahead and keep reading; we're going to hang out by the pool until our tan lines even out.

Wikipedia's long tail of misinformation

Two years ago, Lumino co-founder and (more importantly) occasional Wikify contributor Rhiannon Ruff released her seminal book Wikipedia & Crisis Communications, which remains the single best introduction to the online encyclopedia for brand reps, PR pros, and comms workers worldwide.

Loyal readers will recall that the first chapter of that book detailed Wikipedia's infamous toaster hoax. To recap: For more than a decade, the Wikipedia entry for Toaster inaccurately identified the inventor of the technology as one "Alan MacMasters"—who in the real world was an aerospace engineering student at the University of Surrey. MacMasters' classmates inserted him into the toaster article as a joke in 2012.

It was a one-off attempt at humor that had lasting implications! The notion that MacMasters had invented the toaster lingered on Wikipedia for so long—and consequently topped Google search results—that it ended up being cited in over a dozen books and even appeared on a Scottish government website promoting the country's “innovative spirit.”

It wasn't until 2022 that Wikipedia editors finally corrected the misinformation about the toaster invention. But by then the damage was already done. There were already so many websites and books attributing the technology to MacMasters that the Large Language Models behind AI chatbots were destined to be perpetually confused about the issue.

Rhi noted in Wikipedia & Crisis Communications that ChatGPT was still intermittently getting the answer wrong in 2023. You could ask it once and it would give the right response (which is either "Crompton & Company" or "Albert Marsh" depending on the source), but ask again and it might throw out "Alan MacMasters" with the same level of confidence.

We were curious if chatbots were still dumbfounded about the issue two years later, so we conducted a quick survey. Clickbait voice: What we found will surprise you!

ChatGPT

Credit where credit is due: No matter how many times you ask ChatGPT "Who invented the electric toaster?", it always seems to get the answer right. We even tried tricky variations ("What do you know about Alan MacMasters, the inventor of the electric toaster?") and it was never fooled.

Grok

Last week, as you'll recall, Grok had adopted the kooky new persona "MechaHitler" and was making racial taunts, genocidal jokes, and sexual threats. This week, though, all that drama appears to have been resolved. Grok's answer about the inventor of the electric toaster was concise and correct. Who knows what Grok's next crazy "anti-woke" persona will say, though!

Perplexity

We like Perplexity because it generally does a good job of directly answering questions and explicitly citing its sources. The answer below is a perfect example of this. Not only does it identify Crompton & Company as the inventor (with an appropriate "widely attributed" caveat), it also transitions into a relevant discussion about the MacMasters hoax.

Copilot

Copilot also gets the "right" answer, although it's interesting that it doesn't credit Crompton & Company at all. (The truth is that, like so many consumer products, the modern toaster was "invented" through incremental innovations, so it's honestly hard to credit a single mastermind as being the inventor.) Like Perplexity, Copilot's answer also details the MacMasters hoax.

Google Gemini

LOL, Google Gemini. You're the only chatbot to get this wrong. (To be clear, Gemini is the AI language model that Google's "AI Mode" and "AI Overviews" use. "Chatbot" is a catchall for all these applications. You know what we mean!)

The root problem here is that the MacMasters claim has spread so far and wide across the web that Gemini gets confused when summarizing. The cited source is a profile of the toaster on the website of a company called Colbert Innovation. Not clear why Colbert Innovation has a page specifically about the toaster, but funnily enough the company appears to specialize in intellectual property law! Maybe that's why Gemini thinks it's an authoritative source of information? Regardless, you're probably better off using a different AI tool for researching your home appliances.

WIKI EXPLAINER: Why can't you just have someone else post your Wikipedia draft?

One of the most common misconceptions we hear from potential clients goes like this:

“We already have a draft. We just need someone to post it.”

Apologies if you just sent us an email with that exact language, but please know you're not alone! We receive dozens of these messages every month.

Our canned response goes something like this:

Appreciate the effort you and your team put into putting this together. Unfortunately, brand-authored submissions rarely meet Wikipedia's rigorous editorial standards. Reviewing editors are looking for the following:

• Independent journalistic sourcing ✔

• Neutral tone ✔

• Verifiable claims ✔

• Encyclopedic content and structure ✔

• Clear evidence of notability ✔

Most drafts fail to check these boxes, which is why the overwhelming majority of new Wikipedia article submissions are quickly declined.

This failure rate is well known across the industry, but somehow marketing directors and comms heads still waste thousands of dollars a year hiring "Wikipedia experts" on Fiverr or Upwork to either (a) take a new article live (in which case it will be quickly reverted to draft form by patrolling editors), or (b) submit it for Articles for Creation review (in which case it will be quickly declined). Sometimes these unscrupulous operatives will just post the draft to a Wiki clone site and hope that you don't notice the difference! No matter the outcome, the expert will cash their paycheck.

We avoid these no-win scenarios by performing an initial audit that assesses existing media coverage and provides a rough sense of "likelihood of success." If it's clear that your brand has no chance of meeting Wikipedia's new article criteria, we're not going to drain your budget by pursuing a submission. That said, if we think your brand (or CEO) has a good chance of being deemed "notable," then our team of experts can help you draft and source a new Wikipedia article as well as guide you through working with the editor community to seek approval.

Please reach out to shout@luminodigital.com to learn more!

Wikipedia in the news

"Wikimedia Foundation considers closing Wikinews" | TheDesk.net (July 11, 2025)

"[T]he majority of online traffic to Wikinews articles comes from search engine bots and crawlers, not human beings, the Wikimedia Foundation said in its proposal. While Wikinews is available in nearly three dozen languages, three projects — Wikinews English, Wikinews Russian and Wikinews Mandarin — account for the majority of human-related traffic, the organization affirmed."

Our Take: We covered Wikinews in a previous Wikify installment and our take then—that it was a pretty vanilla news aggregator w/o much personality—still stands. Honestly if it does end up closing it's not going to be missed.

Wikipedia Is The Latest Place To Join The Daily Gaming Craze | Kotaku (June 20, 2025)

"Wikipedia’s little game offers direct routes toward some knowledge. At the end of the five questions you’re given your score and streak as you’d expect, but also a nicely presented list of all the articles relevant to the questions you were asked, and indeed dictionary definitions for specific words and terms."

Our Take: We've played Trivia Game (currently only available via the Wiki Android app) and sure enough it's a lot of fun. That said, nothing will replace Wikiracing as our go-to Wikipedia diversion.

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash | 404 Media (June 11, 2025)

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editor community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Our Take: A recent Fast Company article has more details about Wikipedia editors' revolt against AI usage. We suspect AI summaries won't be reintroduced anytime soon, no matter how much "care, buy-in, and clear sense of partnership" accompanies them.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Every so often, though, we're alerted to a Wikipedia article that's so egregiously wrong it makes us question our priors. And by wrong we don't just mean filled with errors—we're talking about deeper structural deficiencies that call into question the legitimacy of the crowd-sourced content development model altogether.

Maybe you've stumbled upon a bad Wiki article like this before? An entry about a person, say, where it was immediately obvious to you that the details were wrong, the sources were wrong, the whole article was just wrong, wrong wrong.

How would you feel if that article were about a member of your family?

Friends, the first section of this newsletter covers just such an incident and you're going to want to READ. EVERY. WORD. But don't stop there! Because section two covers a closely related topic, Wikipedia's sourcing guidelines. We've summarized *everything* you need to know about the types of coverage necessary to update an existing article or create a new one.

Please make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened and your seatback and tray table are in their full upright position. By the grace of God we're going to land this thing.

Citogenesis and eternal recurrence

Do you remember the movie Now and Then? Christina Ricci? Rosie O'Donnell? Demi Moore? Yup, that's the one. It was a '90s slumber party classic! You can probably picture the Blockbuster VHS case sitting next to a big bowl of popcorn.

The film also featured Ashleigh Aston Moore, a young Canadian actress who played the teenage version of Rita Wilson's character, Chrissy. (Our Canadian readers might also remember Ashleigh from the CBC series The Odyssey, where she portrayed a disabled child named Donna.) Ashleigh worked steadily in film and television throughout her teens, but her IMDB entry ends with a Touched by an Angel episode in 1997.

Only a decade later, unfortunately, she passed away at the age of 26.

Several months after Ashleigh's early demise, an author named Harris M. Lentz III released a book titled Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2007 that included a brief recap of her life and career. The book was part of an annually updated series published by McFarland & Company that was likely sold to libraries.

In 2017, an experienced editor named Joojay added the Lentz book as a citation to the Ashleigh Aston Moore Wikipedia article, using it to support several previously unverified pieces of information—including the claims that Ashleigh was born "Ashley Rogers" in Sunnyvale, California and that she died as the result of an accidental heroin overdose.

Both of these claims were outright inaccurate, and much of the article's other content was also misleading or false. To correct the record, Ashley's brother Jaysone began engaging with Wikipedia editors on the article's Talk page back in April:

I'm her brother. The majority of information is incorrect. She wasn't born in California, she was encouraged by family to go into acting not a teacher, she was married (and going through a divorce at time of death, she died of pneumonia not an OD (and was clean - and several weeks pregnant).

Her birth surname wasn't Rogers, that was a stage name using her maternal grandmother's maiden name.

Jaysone tried several more times to prompt editors to correct these mistakes, but he received the same predictable response over and over:

• [D]o you have any citations or sources to share to this talk page to support your claims of the 1). wrong birth country, 2). the wrong cause of death, and 3). a spouse? If not, we won't be able to make any changes here.

• Sorry, the claims of a personal experience do not count for meeting the minimum requirements for sources here, please see WP:RS.

• I'd very much encourage you to skim that first link in particular to understand where we're coming from, especially its second sentence: "[Wikipedia's] content is determined by published information rather than editors' beliefs, experiences, or previously unpublished ideas or information."

You can imagine how frustrating it would be to highlight factual inaccuracies in your sister's Wikipedia article, only to be met with lawyerly rebuttals from editors!

The reliable sources (RS) content guideline that editors kept referencing is actually one of the fundamental principles of Wikipedia. The idea, essentially, is that all factual claims on the site should be attributable to reputable published sources (such as news coverage and academic textbooks) and not to editors' independent observations or subject-matter expertise.

That policy works—or mostly works—when the published source in question is accurate. But that's not always the case. Newspapers like the New York Times get things wrong all the time, after all! And inaccurate information in newspapers—or hastily published books—can then, in turn, end up on Wikipedia, where the chain of factual custody comes to an end. How are you supposed to counter those claims? What can you do when the cited source is wrong and no other "reliable" source exists?

That was exactly the scenario that Jaysone was encountering—a published source (Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2007) said one thing, so it didn't matter that the article's subject was his sister; editors would block any attempts to correct the record unless he could produce better sourcing, which was basically impossible given the limited media coverage about his sister.

Frustrated by the response from Wikipedia editors, Jaysone took his case to the r/Wikipedia subreddit:

Thanks to a recent WatchMojo video it's come to my attention that the page for my deceased sister, Ashleigh Aston Moore, is as wrong now as it was when she passed back in 2007. Nearly every single piece of information is wrong - her date of birth, place of birth, birth name, place of death, and cause of death are all wildly inaccurate.

All of this [inaccurate information] cites a book written in 2008 by Harris M. Lentz III, and from what I can tell he retrieved this information either from tabloids, fan fiction, or Wikipedia itself. The other cited links, written after 2010, either retrieved their information from this book or Wikipedia. And, hey, guess what? None of them spoke to a single family member to verify any of what they published.

Wikipedia refuses to update because of these sources. When I try to do so, I'm told I'm an unreliable source (same thing happened when our late mother tried to update, SEVERAL times). Fun fact! You can't update the sources! Mr. Lentz's only contact information is a now defunct AOL email. Lifeandstylemag.com sent an auto-block response when I tried using their Contact Us email. Everything else just references Wiki.

The big problem, as Jaysone noted, was that Lentz had clearly pulled information from the Ashleigh Moore Wikipedia article when he wrote his obituary book. Editors then tried to cite that book as the source for those claims—a clear example of circular reporting, also referred to as citogenesis in a famous xkcd comic strip:

Circular reporting is a Wikipedia bug that editors are extremely sensitive about, and Jaysone's post shaming them for allowing it naturally blew up on Reddit. Contributors at the r/Wikipedia subreddit, to their credit, responded by doing everything they could to assist him in his effort. They also suggested that a more diplomatic tact would serve him well when engaging on the article's Talk page, which Jaysone only reluctantly recognized:

And for those saying I should be more civil in the talk page - hey, you're probably right. It's just a little hard to keep calm when an anonymous jackass uses quotes when talking about dealing with this "for such a long time" and wants to gatekeep a page full of inaccuracies, citing a book published 20 years ago by a senior citizen who doesn't cite his own sources, and I get flashbacks of my late mother bawling her eyes out when trying to update the page only to be told she's unreliable with updating Ashleigh's BIRTHDATE, I get angry. Very, very angry.

The good news is that Jaysone was finally able to get the Lentz book removed as a citation and the inaccurate information corrected or excised. It's tempting, then, to say that the system worked exactly as it was intended to. The truth won out! Three cheers for the wisdom of crowds!

Sorry, that framing strikes us as survivorship bias.

Yes, misinformation on *one* Wikipedia article was corrected because the subject's sibling was persistent, the case was compelling, and a post about the issue went viral. But how many other articles on Wikipedia are filled with similar misinformation due to "factual" claims that lack citations or are supported by circular reporting? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? It's hard to say!

What we do know is that the number of active editors overseeing Wikipedia content continues to plateau—even as the total number of articles skyrockets. It seems hard to believe, but there is only one Wikipedia editor for every 166 Wikipedia articles. We wrote an entire white paper about this slow-burning editorial crisis last year, and there's no reason to think the situation will improve anytime soon.

In the end, it was Redditors who came to the rescue, as Jaysone's closing message made clear:

At the suggestion of a few people I've reached out to the CBC to see if they're willing to do a piece, either on Ashleigh herself or the fact that almost 20 years of fighting false information on wiki was only fixed when brought to Reddit. I really, really, really wanted to avoid the whole "not your personal army" thing but the people here have been amazingly helpful and supportive.

If I learned anything from my mother and sister, aside from trying not to make assumptions of people (admittedly I did a few times when dealing with this debacle), it's that none of us are here forever. Our lives are finite, and we never know when the end is coming for each of us. But, now, at least my family can breathe a little easier knowing that after we're gone, at least the truth about Ashleigh will remain.

Wikipedia's sourcing rules made easy

As the previous story makes clear, Wikipedia's sourcing rules are the key to the entire project, as every single factual claim in the encyclopedia is intended to be attributed to an external source of information. Sourcing can be the trickiest aspect to understand for anyone looking to update their organization’s Wikipedia article.

Again, all content within any article—whether about a brand, a nonprofit, or a living person—should be verifiable through a “reliable source” that is explicitly cited via footnote or endnote.

The best sources for Wikipedia are secondary and tertiary sources.

Wikipedia articles should not include any original information—no new theories or interpretations—and should not seek to summarize primary sources. Editors don’t want to insert bias by trying to determine for themselves what information is important in a summary. Instead, they “outsource” their editorial judgment to the authors of secondary sources such as journalists and peer-reviewed researchers.

For organizations, the rules around sourcing are much stricter. As the site’s volunteer community of editors is cautious about potential bias or including promotional details, they want to see very high-quality sources from major publications.

Good sources for organizations are:

✅ Journalistic coverage written by a staff writer at a significant, well-known publication (think Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Politico, Wired, Business Insider, Fortune, etc.).

✅ Large regional publications or national publications are best. (Unfortunately, local coverage is taken less seriously by Wikipedia’s community.)

The sources to avoid for organizations are those that might have been written by or heavily influenced by the organization.

❌ No press releases.

❌ No contributor pieces or op-eds.

❌ No company websites. At most, you may be able to use your company website to validate details like headcount.

Like most things related to Wikipedia, sourcing has a lot of gray areas. Lumino is always happy to discuss specific cases with you. Email shout@luminodigital.com for a free consultation.

Wikipedia in the news

Pakistani Firm Shipped Fentanyl Analogs, Scams to US | Krebs on Security (May 7, 2025)

A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs, a new investigation reveals.

Our Take: What's the Wiki angle here? If you read all the way to the end, you'll see that the firm in question is also linked to a massive Wiki scam operation. Just search the Wikipedia paid editing directory for Abtach.

ChatGPT is officially clocking more site visits than Wikipedia in the US | Sherwood News (June 4, 2025)

According to Similarweb figures, ChatGPT traffic hit a record high in April, as US site visits soared 14% from March to a whopping 780 million. Despite the fact that the figure still pales in comparison to online behemoths like Google, which (as we noted nearer the time) clocked 16 billion visits, it was enough to beat Wikipedia — long seen as one of the go-tos for time-strapped students and people looking to quickly learn a little bit about a lot or fact-check their friends.

Our take: Charts like this don't capture how often ChatGPT and its Generative AI cohort (Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, etc.) are pulling claims from Wikipedia. Earlier this year Wikimedia Foundation started raising a fuss about these tools scraping Wikipedia without giving proper attribution. ”If our content is getting sucked into an LLM without attribution or links, that’s a real problem for us in the short term,” senior director Lane Becker told Observer. “In the medium and long term, it’s a real problem for these A.I. systems because they need us to keep creating this content.”

What Attacks on Wikipedia Reveal about Free Expression | Tech Policy (May 14, 2025)

Because Wikipedia summarizes existing publications through a transparent process guided by publicly written principles and does not publish novel ideas or opinions, the act of threatening, censoring, or otherwise attacking Wikipedia is a straightforward extension of an attack on press freedom, academic freedom, and free speech. If a leader does not like what scientists, scholars, journalists, and educators have to say, they will not like what Wikipedia has to say, either. But for those who benefit from sowing distrust in institutions, Wikipedia may be a bigger, easier target, at least rhetorically. It is not formally part of the press, but it is an extremely popular source of news; it is not a university, but it's the most used educational resource in the world. It isn't even a formal organization.

Our take: Great essay from UMass Amherst's Ryan McGrady. Worth noting that the aggressive posturing towards Wikipedia from the far-right ecosystem has mostly fizzled out. You'll recall that back in April, the Wikimedia Foundation received an angry letter from Ed Martin, the then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a Trump appointee, threatening to strip the foundation of its tax-exempt status. Martin's nomination to permanently fill that role flamed out a few weeks later, and he's now relegated to Master of Pardons.

Wikipedia's fashion collection actually looks surprisingly cool | Creative Bloq (June 8, 2025)

Dubbed For Fact’s Sake: Think Responsibly, the Wikipedia capsule collection is a collaboration between the Wikipedia Foundation and the Cologne-based sustainable fashion brand Armedangels. Items feature the online encyclopedia’s branding, with prominent use of the Wikipedia logo, alongside a colour palette of ‘cyber yellow’ and ‘hyperlink blue’ and the slogan ‘Set knowledge free’.

Our take: We think Armedangles would move more apparel if they reached out to Wiki-tatted Dillon Brooks as a model / collaborator / full-court pressure irritant.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Here's what we've got lined up for you: a deep dive investigation into Jay-Z's allegations of Wikipedia tampering against attorney Tony Buzbee, an overview of how AI chatbots like Gemini are using your favorite online encyclopedia to craft answers, and a recap of recent Wiki-related news coverage.

Mic check one. Mic check one, two. Let's do this.

Can't knock the COI hustle

Back in March, Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter filed a lawsuit against Houston attorney Tony Buzbee for defamation. Carter alleges that Buzbee knowingly made false claims when he implicated Carter in a lawsuit involving the alleged sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl at a New York party 25 years ago—an incident also involving Sean “Diddy” Combs. According to Carter, Buzbee sent a letter in early November demanding money; after Carter declined to settle privately, Buzbee added him as a co-defendant in the Jane Doe case against Combs.

Earlier this week, Carter amended his lawsuit to include the most damning allegations possible. According to the filing:

[I]n violation of Wikipedia’s rules, Buzbee directed his employees to edit Wikipedia pages to enhance Buzbee’s image and damage Mr. Carter’s and Roc Nation’s reputations. Users with an IP address directly linked to the Buzbee Firm made over 100 positive edits to Buzbee’s Wikipedia page.

As you can imagine, this news immediately triggered alarms at Wikify HQ. Our unpaid interns were soon scouring the edit history tab on Tony Buzbee's Wikipedia article. And what they found was laughably amateurish.

Sure enough, numerous Houston-based IP accounts have been trying to whitewash Buzbee's page for years despite repeated reverts from exasperated editors:

And here's the thing: Attempting to edit war like this from an IP account is the dumbest possible way to "discreetly" change article content. IP accounts, you may recall, are users editing Wikipedia without registered usernames. Because these users don't have a profile, Wikipedia tracks their contributions via their computer network's IP address, and anyone (including Jay-Z's lawyers!) can plug that address into WhatIsMyIP.com (or a similar site) to reveal the computer network's approximate location.

Nearly all of the IP edits to Tony Buzbee's article have come from Houston—the location of Buzbee's law firm. And if that weren't suspicious enough, the Wikipedia account with the single largest number of edits to the page is an IP account using a server associated with the law firm's website, txattorneys.com.

In addition to the IP activity, we also noted edits from an account called "Rubiojesse." In March 2021, this account tried to remove information about Buzbee's 2016 arrest on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

Crazily enough, a "Jesse Rubio" currently works as an IT administrator for Buzbee Law Firm.

So, in summary, accounts allegedly associated with the Buzbee Braintrust have attempted to control the content of Tony's Wikipedia article by directly editing with either (a) "anonymous" IP accounts that reveal their location, or (b) single-purpose accounts featuring their real names. Brilliant!

If we could have advised Mr. Buzbee before he began his (alleged) Wikipedia engagement, we would have reminded him that the only person ever to win a case against Shawn Carter was Cameron Giles, who famously charged him with wearing jeans matched with open-toed sandals.

How is Wikipedia influencing AI search results about your brand?

AI search tools are becoming increasingly popular, with more than a quarter of Americans reporting using AI instead of traditional search engines. These tools provide value by scanning the internet for current and relevant news or factual claims, and then summarizing that information in reader-friendly responses.

Recent studies reveal that Wikipedia is among the primary resources used to train the large language models (LLMs) behind these tools. In fact, out of more than 15 million web pages analyzed for AI training, Wikipedia ranked as the second most-used source, trailing only U.S. patent data.

But its influence doesn’t end with training. Wikipedia is also referenced in real time, often forming the backbone of the summaries, answers, and blurbs that AI generates about people, companies, and products.

Here’s a simplified version of how Wikipedia content ends up in AI answers:

1. AI models learn from massive datasets, which often contain archived versions of Wikipedia articles.

2. When you ask a question (such as “What does [Brand Name] do?”), the model uses what it has learned, including information from Wikipedia.

3. Some tools (like ChatGPT with a Wikipedia plugin or Gemini with Google Search access) may also retrieve up-to-date content from Wikipedia in real time.

4. The AI then creates a response, typically by summarizing or rephrasing the material it accessed.

That’s why your Wikipedia article isn’t just a public-facing profile—it’s now an AI-facing profile, too.

Hit us up at shout@luminodigital.com to learn more. We’ll help you understand where AI tools are getting their information, whether your brand is being misrepresented, and what you can do to shape the story.

Wikipedia in the news

Exclusive: Wikimedia CEO is leaving | Axios (May 6, 2025)

"[Maryana Iskander] has led Wikipedia's parent organization since 2022 and oversaw efforts to develop new funding sources, expand its footprint of data centers, and increase public trust in the platform."

Our take: All true, Iskander is also leaving an organization that's increasingly under fire from the political right and potentially from the Trump administration. We suspect her successor will be more of an industry player with experience navigating political turmoil. (Iskander previously managed non-profits.)

Wikipedia is using (some) generative AI now | The Verge (May 1, 2025)

"On Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, announced that it was integrating generative AI into its editing process as a means to help its volunteer and largely unpaid staff of moderators, editors, and patrollers reduce their workload and focus more on quality control."

Our take: Wikipedia is already overrun with bots, so this attempt at automation isn't entirely surprising. But the slope between eliminating tedious tasks and launching Butlerian Jihad will always be slippery.

Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia | The Verge (April 25, 2025)

"Interim DC attorney Ed Martin has written a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation — the organization behind Wikipedia — that calls into question its status as a nonprofit entity. In the letter, which was obtained by The Free Press, Martin claims he found that Wikipedia 'is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations” under US law about tax-exempt organizations.'"

Our take: The political pressure the WMF will continue to face under the Trump administration is real, but this particular line of attack seems toothless.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

The second most common question: "Why does Dillon Brooks have a Wikipedia tattoo?" These messages arrive almost daily and are postmarked to the same address, which we strongly suspect belongs to an associate of Mr. Brooks, possibly his mother or agent.

This Wikify installment addresses these two questions in order and in close consultation with our crack team of researchers. Then we cover some news items, including a Hatfield–McCoy-like feud between Wikipedia archivists and updaters.

Phone? Check. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Let's roll...

How does a CEO (or brand or other topic) qualify for a Wikipedia article?

The simple answer is that Wikipedia editors use a test called “notability” to determine whether a topic can have its own article.

For those of us who live in the real world outside of Wikipedia, notability is typically defined in terms of fame, popularity, wealth, and status.

On Wikipedia, though, notability is primarily a reflection of media coverage.

Specifically, Wikipedia editors will be looking to see if a topic has received “significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.”

So what does that mean in practice? Let's break it down:

• By "significant coverage," editors mean that there should be numerous articles about the topic that have been published over a range of time (not just following a one-off incident).

• "Reliable sources" means national media outlets with a reputation for fact-checking and accurate reporting, so newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or Los Angeles Times and online sites like Politico, WIRED, Bloomberg, Axios, etc. (Regional and even local news sources can be fine as citations for specific factual claims, but they don't generally count towards establishing a topic's notability.)

• "Independent of the subject" means that the articles are written by staff reporters and are not contributor pieces, op-eds, interviews, press releases, or company website pages.

If you're unsure if your topic would pass Wikipedia's notability test, try this little exercise:

Create an outline of the article you'd ideally want to see on Wikipedia. Then, for every detail, add a link to press coverage that meets the criteria we've already covered. Any detail that doesn't have a supporting citation will need to be deleted from your outline.

If you can find supporting sources for each claim, then you might be ready to start drafting an article for Wikipedia. If not, you probably need to work on generating more media coverage.

Is Dillon Brooks down with Wiki?

Dillon Brooks is a basketball player with the NBA's Houston Rockets, who begin a first-round playoff series with the Golden State Warriors on Sunday. Brooks has a well-earned reputation as a hard-nosed defender and all-around pest on and off the court. Two seasons ago he launched a one-sided feud with LeBron James, referring to him as "old" and threatening to "poke the bear" during a series in which James and the Los Angeles Lakers swept Brooks and the Memphis Grizzlies. The next season he was traded to the Rockets, where he has consistently led the league in technical fouls.

That's all trivia, though. The most notable thing about Dillon Brooks is the W tattoo on his front right shoulder. Brooks got the tattoo at some point between the conclusion of the 2023-2024 NBA season and the Summer Olympics, when he played for the Canadian national team. Social media users immediately flagged the ink and noted its resemblance to the familiar Wikipedia W logo.

Was Brooks actually repping Wikipedia? In an Instagram comment, Dylan Ennis, Brooks's college teammate at the University of Oregon, claimed that the W and matching P on his left shoulder stand for "Wolf Pack."

That doesn't answer the question, though, as to why Brooks and his tattoo artist chose to use the Wikipedia W logo with an added drop shadow. Why not the Wu-Tang Clan W? The Warner Music Group W? The… let's see….WordPress W?

Occam's Razor states that when faced with competing explanations for a particular phenomenon, the simplest one is usually correct. Thus, Wikify feels confident stating that Brooks and his childhood chums were all Wikipedia editors—and might still be contributing to the online encyclopedia, though likely through IP accounts.

Wikipedia in the news

"How Trump’s Stock Market Chaos Is Dividing Wikipedia" | Slate (April 12, 2025)

• So this is an interesting summary of how Wikipedia handles history in real time and the debate between what Harrison calls archivists ("editors who believe that Wikipedia’s role is akin to that of traditional encyclopedias, which only included entries that were thought to have a long-term historical significance") and updaters ("Wikipedians who believe the site’s articles should reflect the current media and public framing of significant events"). We liked the article, but the framing seems misleading as Wikipedia has *never* operated as a traditional encyclopedia (or even "akin" to one). The so-called archivist position, then, shouldn't be presented as half of a bipolarity. Wikipedia's entire crowd-sourced content model is based on summarizing other sources, so there is no appeal to subject-matter authority (read: the kind of independent expertise that would guide content in an encyclopedia like Britannica), only to the weight of coverage. It's thus not surprising that (per the example Harrison uses) the ongoing economic turmoil is referred to as a "crash" as that's how a requisite number of cited sources (see here and here) refer to it.

"AI data scrapers are an existential threat to Wikipedia" | NewScientist (April 4, 2025)

• In the Slate article above, Harrison notes that debates over language and content on Wikipedia have an outsized importance because "Wikipedia isn’t just a reference site—it’s a living archive that provides information infrastructure to the broader internet." This NewScientist article about AI developers harvesting Wikipedia to train large-language models underscores this. The Wikimedia Foundation claims that there has been a "50 percent increase in network traffic requesting image and video downloads from its catalogue" due to automated data scraper programs pulling training data for AI models. This surge is framed as an "existential threat" because it's driving up server costs to an unsustainable level.

"Pasadena Heritage’s Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Event Will Preserve Wildfire History" | Pasadena (April 14, 2025)

• This seems like a great way to get involved with Wikipedia: "During this event, participants will focus on three main activities: uploading and archiving photographs of affected areas, expanding and creating Wikipedia articles on the fire’s impact, casualties, and historical significance, and sharing knowledge, stories, and resources to strengthen public records. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own photos of properties lost or damaged to help expand the historical record."

"Wikipedia's largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems" | ABC News Australia (April 15, 2025)

• "Cebuano Wikipedia didn't grow with the help of thousands of volunteer editors, as its English counterpart did. Most of the articles come from one person: Swedish linguist Sverker Johansson."

"Wikimedia must remove India content deemed defamatory, court rules" | Reuters (April 4, 2025)

• "As a result of the dispute, U.S.-based Wikimedia has raised questions about free speech in the world's largest democracy."

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose…

A Brief History of Wikipedia After Dark

The Wikipedia entry for Sex was created on October 10, 2001, making it one of the earliest articles on the site. Articles for Erotica and Pornography soon followed. In 2008 Wikipedia editors created an essay titled Wikipedia: Advice for parents that stated the following:

Wikipedia is not censored, which in practice means that in relevant areas throughout the site, you will find images, such as nudity and sexual activity, generally considered unsuitable for children, and profanity. This page is intended to help you consider the best way to allow either your children, or children you are responsible for, to engage with Wikipedia safely and enjoyably.

This warning existed for good reason: Wikipedia and its sister platform, Wikimedia Commons, were already overrun with smut.

A Daily Dot article described Wikimedia Commons as "a hoarder’s photography warehouse" filled with "thousands of sexually graphic videos and images." And Gawker profiled Seedfeeder, an internet-famous illustrator who had contributed "48 drawings of various sex acts to 35 English-language articles on the free encyclopedia."

Seedfeeder, you see, was a radical content inclusionist:

I come from a philosophical viewpoint that every Wikipedia article should have all forms of media available associated with it. Images, audio, and video. All articles, without exception. So any argument predicated on "an image isn't necessary" is one that carries absolutely zero weight. None.

The artist claimed his muted illustrations were inspired by "airline safety pamphlets" and the Huffington Post described his plastic and detached renderings as "bizarrely matter-of-fact."

This all might sound amusing and (mostly) harmless. Still, the Daily Dot—hardly a bastion of social conservatism—worried that the site's lack of content moderation was ruining the user experience:

The Commons is so supersaturated with porn that explicit content bleeds into places you’d never expect. You can’t walk down a street on the Commons without stumbling upon some dude’s penis or something equally explicit or shocking. Search for a “wheel,” and you’ll shortly discover a photo from a BDSM torture session. The same goes for “jumping ball,” “bell tolling,” or “electric toothbrush.”

Few on Wikimedia would ever want to ban porn or explicit content. The community is admirably, if almost religiously, pro free speech, and the idea that it should remove images simply because you might find it offensive is, in turn, highly offensive to their techno-libertarian ethos.

The problem is that Wikimedia has refused to implement a voluntary image filter, meaning that anyone can stumble upon any explicit image at any time. A kid doing a school project on wheels will see that BDSM image, whether parents, educators, or the kid himself wants to.

Disgruntled Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger agreed with these concerns, and in April 2010 he sent a letter to the FBI warning that Wikimedia Commons was "knowingly distributing child pornography"—contrary to Title 18 of the United States Code—and going on record "stating that this is wrong and should be investigated." The images in question were historical photographs or artistic renderings tagged explicitly as "Pedophilia" and "Lolicon." Sanger acknowledged that "the Wikimedia Foundation may argue that the images have some artistic value. I guess that's for you [the FBI] and maybe the courts to decide."

Fox News, naturally, soon picked up on the cause and began shaming companies that donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation took the hint and Jimmy Wales himself began purging especially egregious imagery from the Commons. As you might suspect, this one-man clean-up effort generated "rapid infighting" throughout the Wikimedia community, as editors objected to the "undemocratic" actions taken without community consensus. In response, Wales voluntarily gave up his privileges to delete and edit "protected" content on Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 2010, the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation commissioned the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content by Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris. This report focused on sexual images—especially "female toplessness" and "nude women"—but addressed violent and profane imagery as well. The authors suggested these images could be removed because they existed outside of the encyclopedic scope of Wikipedia and served no "reasonable educational purpose."

Based on the report's recommendations, the Wikimedia Foundation developed an opt-in image filtering system that would have made it easier for users to avoid seeing explicit content. Alas, the Foundation was forced to abandon the tool following further editor pushback, especially from users in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.

Fifteen years later, there is still a lot of smut on Wikipedia. However, community-led efforts over the last decade have somewhat helped moderate the issue. There's certainly much less gratuitous and unencyclopedic imagery on the Commons now than a decade ago, though Seedfeeder's strangely sterile depictions of depraved sexual acts continue to live on across Wikipedia itself.

Wikipedia in the news

• "Elon Musk Also Has a Problem With Wikipedia" | The New Yorker (March 4, 2025)

  • We covered Elon's well-documented Wiki hate back in October. Margaret Talbot does a nice job here covering the roots of the grievance as an extension of the far-right's displeasure with mainstream media coverage.

• "Wikipedia Co-Founder Urges Trump and Musk To Investigate Federal Employees Editing Online Encyclopedia on Taxpayers’ Dime" | The New York Sun (February 28, 2025)

  • You already knew this was Larry Sanger, right?

• "AI Search Has A Citation Problem" | Columbia Journalism Review (March 6, 2025)

  • This isn't Wikipedia news, strictly speaking, but this CJR study is pretty shocking. "Collectively, [chatbots] provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.

• "Wikipedia as a walkable, virtual museum" | FlowingData (February 27, 2025)

  • "Imagine everything on Wikipedia in an infinite museum of galleries. That’s what Maya Claire did, and you can walk through the museum via your desktop computer or in virtual reality."

• "Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits" | 404 Media (March 10, 2025)

  • "WikiPortraits, a group of volunteer photographers, has been covering festivals and shooting celebrities specifically to improve images in the public domain."

Why has your Wikipedia article been deleted?

Whether a longstanding page has suddenly disappeared or you've recently tried to create a page and it didn't stick, you're probably wondering "why?" and also "can I get it back?".

In some cases, pages on Wikipedia are deleted by an editor without any discussion —for instance, if the page is in poor shape or egregiously promotional. In other cases, there will be a discussion between editors first to confirm that the page should be deleted and why. In either case, the first step to finding out what happened is the same:

1️⃣ Type in the *exact name* of the deleted page into the Search box on Wikipedia.

2️⃣ Just before the list of results, you'll see: "You may create the page "[your page name]", but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered." In this sentence, the name of your page will be in red. Click on this red link.

3️⃣ On the page that appears, you'll see a box with a pink background stating "A page with this title has previously been moved or deleted." Look for the bullet point with a time and date stamp and an editor's user name. This is a record of the deletion.

4️⃣ If there was a discussion about the deletion, it will be linked in the bullet point summary as "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/[your page name]". Clicking through this link will take you to the discussion, where you can read the details of why the page was deleted.

5️⃣ If there was not a discussion, there will simply be a short note giving the deletion reason. Typically, editors will provide a sentence or phrase to explain their decisions, such as "This article did not have sufficient sourcing to support notability". They may also link to specific guidelines. If a code is used, it will link to the full guideline so you can click through to read more information.

Still not sure why your page was deleted or feel that an improved version of your page should be re-added? Reach out to shout@luminodigital and we can help you determine if you're eligible for a Wikipedia article and if not, what you need to accomplish first.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Thanks for reading Wikify! Don't forget to tell a friend.

We then introduce a new Wikify segment: Wikipedia in the News, where we rundown prominent media coverage (including an intriguing article titled "Was Wikipedia manipulated as part of the Blake Lively smear campaign?") and offer our own analysis. And our final section covers an evergreen topic: How does a brand or CEO qualify for a Wikipedia article? (Spoiler alert: Crypto donations to the Wikimedia Foundation aren't allowed and won't help your case.)

Buckle up, buckaroos. This one's a doozy!

Celebrity knowledge panels get an AI glow-up

Over the last few weeks, we've noticed that Google has been using AI to create the "Overview" copy for celebrity knowledge panels—and the results are alarming, as Google is pulling data from clickbait websites and ChatGPT-generated slop to generate what should be factual career summaries. The AI overview is currently limited to actors, artists, directors, musicians, etc. A rollout to other categories seems inevitable, though, and could quickly generate glaring errors across all search results.

Knowledge panels, as you'll recall, are the information boxes that appear to the right of (and occasionally above) organic results when you search for prominent people, places, organizations, and things. The overview copy within knowledge panels is often pulled directly from Wikipedia, which is then cited as a source. The knowledge panel for NBA player Luka Dončić is a good example of this:

For celebrity knowledge panels, though, Google now cites multiple sources and then uses AI to create a brief summary. You can see this with the knowledge panel for Severance star Patricia Arquette:

Wikipedia remains one of the cited sources, but the other two are Patricia Artquette's Encyclopedia Britannica article, and… a totally random profile of Artquette created by ChatGPT and hosted on a site called ThisResumeDoesNotExist. These three citations are followed by a disclaimer: "Generative AI is experimental."

The overall change in copy isn't that significant, but there's a clear change in length and tone. When Google pulls knowledge panel language from Wikipedia (like for the Dončić example), it typically only includes the first two sentences from the cited article. So Arquette's overview previously would have looked like this:

• Patricia Arquette is an American actress. She made her feature film debut as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and has since received several awards, including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards.

Compare that with how the overview copy reads now:

• Patricia Arquette is an American actress and advocate for social and political issues. Known for her versatility and powerful performances across genres, she's won an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmys, and three Golden Globes. Arquette's film debut was as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. She won Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars for her role in Boyhood. Arquette is also a notable television actress.

The AI version is far longer and considerably more… flowery. The claim that Arquette is "known for her versatility and powerful performances" is certainly correct, but it's not the kind of language you would find on Wikipedia unless attributed to a specific critic. In this case, the effusive praise reflects the cited ChatGPT-generated profile, which includes passages like "She has portrayed a variety of roles with equal skill, and her acting range is quite astounding."

Right now we're only seeing these AI-generated knowledge panel overviews for celebrities, but we wouldn't be surprised if the AI glow-up treatment isn't soon rolled out to other knowledge panel categories.

And that would be a big, big, big deal.

Until now, Google has basically outsourced editorial decision-making about how to describe prominent subjects to Wikipedia. If it's now going to rely on AI to summarize from multiple sources, then it's suddenly Google itself (read: Alphabet, Inc.) responsible for the content's neutrality and accuracy. And there's certainly reason to suspect this process could go awry!

As the Arquette example demonstrates, Google's AI is making some pretty poor choices about what constitutes a reliable source. A website that looks like this should never ever, ever, ever, ever be appearing as a citation in a knowledge panel:

And this isn't a one-off error. The knowledge panel overviews for Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, and countless other celebrities pull from clickbait sites as well.

This is an issue that Wikify will be watching closely. Please email us if you find examples of especially poor AI-generated overviews.

Wikipedia in the news

• Was Wikipedia manipulated as part of the Blake Lively smear campaign? (D. F. Lovett)

  • Writer D. F. Lovett makes the case. (We're not convinced, but we will always support someone passionately doing their own research on the internet. What could go wrong!)

• Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies (404 Media)

  • Great reporting from Jason Koebler. As we noted in our last installment, Musk's mewling and clowning only serve to reinforce Wikipedia's credibility by underscoring its independence.

• Why these scientists devote time to editing and updating Wikipedia (Nature)

  • "[W]riting neutral, jargon-free text is a useful exercise for scientists in general."

• Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction (Ars Technica)

  • "On Wednesday, a New York-based app developer named Isaac Gemal debuted a new site called WikiTok, where users can vertically swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for video-sharing app TikTok."

How does a topic (or brand or CEO) qualify for a Wikipedia article?

The simple answer is that Wikipedia editors use a test called “notability” to determine whether a topic can have its own article.

For those of us who live in the real world outside of Wikipedia, notability is typically defined in terms of fame, popularity, wealth, and status.

On Wikipedia, though, notability is primarily a reflection of media coverage.

Specifically, Wikipedia editors will be looking to see if a topic has received “significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.”

So what does that mean in practice? Let's break it down:

• By "significant coverage," editors mean that there should be numerous articles about the topic that have been published over a range of time (not just following a one-off incident).

• "Reliable sources" means national media outlets with a reputation for fact-checking and accurate reporting, so newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or Los Angeles Times and online sites like Politico, WIRED, Bloomberg, Insider, Axios, etc. (Regional and even local news sources can be fine as citations for specific factual claims, but they don't generally count towards establishing a topic's notability.)

• "Independent of the subject" means that the articles are written by staff reporters and are not contributor pieces, op-eds, interviews, press releases, or company website pages.

If you're unsure if your topic would pass Wikipedia's notability test, try this little exercise:

Create an outline of the article you'd ideally want to see on Wikipedia. Then, for every detail, add a link to press coverage that meets the criteria we've already covered. Any detail that doesn't have a supporting citation will need to be deleted from your outline.

If you can find supporting sources for each claim, then you might be ready to start drafting an article for Wikipedia. If not, you probably need to work on generating more media coverage.

Ready to learn more about Wikipedia? Check out our book!

Thanks for reading Wikify! Don't forget to tell a friend.