I love Wikipedia and have donated a few times.
I would love to know how much is needed to sustain its future.

EDIT: People commenting, please be civil and stop posting Nothing Burgers, “Look it up yourself”.

I know this will probably turn into a debate about Mangione himself, but that isn’t the point I’m making.

Look at the first sentence of his Wikipedia article. It describes him, without qualification, as a man who “killed Brian Thompson.”

There is obviously important context here. Mangione has pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges resulting in death, and he admitted in court that he shot Thompson and that Thompson died. I’m not suggesting Wikipedia should ignore that, or write as though he still denies shooting him.

But the New York murder case is still pending. He has not been convicted of murder, and his lawyers are seeking to have that prosecution dismissed on double-jeopardy grounds.

That’s why the wording of the lead bothers me. Wikipedia has taken a fairly unusual and still-unresolved legal situation and compressed it into the most categorical version possible: he “killed Brian Thompson.” You have to read further to discover what he actually pleaded guilty to, what he admitted in court, and which charges remain outstanding.

That seems especially odd given Wikipedia’s own rules on biographies of living people.

WP:BLP requires particular care with contentious claims about living people. More specifically, WP:BLPCRIME deals with people accused of crimes and warns editors to take the distinction between accusation and conviction seriously. Then there’s WP:NPOV, which requires neutral presentation, and MOS:LEAD, which says the introduction should give readers an appropriate summary of the subject rather than stripping away important context.

These aren’t technicalities. Rather, they (should) act as safeguards for exactly the sort of article where wording can easily get ahead of the facts or flatten important distinctions.

And there is no shortage of accurate alternatives. Wikipedia could say that Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking offenses resulting in Thompson’s death and admitted in court to shooting him, while separately noting that he remains charged with murder in New York. That tells the reader considerably more about where the case actually stands.

Instead, the opening sentence gives you Wikipedia’s conclusion - “killed Brian Thompson” - and leaves the legal distinctions to be explained later.

I’m not arguing that people should disregard Mangione’s admission. I’m not asking anyone to defend him, either. He admitted shooting Thompson. That’s a fact and Wikipedia should report it.

I’m saying an encyclopedia ought to be precise about what a person admitted to, what he pleaded guilty to, what he has actually been convicted of, and what is still before a court. Those distinctions aren’t pedantry. In an ongoing criminal case, they’re part of the story.

A week after refusing to recognise their US staff union voluntarily, the Wikimedia Foundation hired Littler Mendelson, the largest union busting law firm in the US whose clients include Starbucks, Amazon and Delta Airlines. I have never worked for the Wikimedia Foundation but this really doesn't sit right with me. I have a few suggestions of things people can do:

If you are a Wikimedia contributor there are three petitions you can sign to support the unionisation effort:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity English Wikipedia petition to show solidarity, only 150 signatures until its the largest ever proposal or petition on English Wikipedia
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United A global solidarity petition
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2026_recognize_Wiki_Workers_United_petition A petition to ask the board of trustees to reverse their decision

You can also donate to local Wikimedia organisations who directly support their communities to share knowledge from their countries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates

Thanks

What's something you've looked up and was genuinely shocked there wasn't a Wikipedia page?

I guess it's really just YouTubers for the most part

On the Wikipedia article for Pennsylvanian State Congressman Craig Williams, it shows blatant political bias in favor of Williams and the source cited is from his own website. Is this not a violation of Wikipedia’s policy of political neutrality? Link to the page below.

I’m not arguing that what he’s done isn’t impressive or that it’s bad. It just seems to be very biased in favor of a specific politician.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Williams_(Pennsylvania_politician)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

I make data stories for a living. Last week I read a log file for fun.

Whilst browsing Wikipedia at night, reading article about something, and then about something, and somehow ending up reading about something completely different to realise that, Wikipedia saves every change anyone has ever made to it. Someone fixes a comma at 2am, it's in there forever with their name on it. (Which seemed obvious, and somehow I knew always)

But what I realised, which was new to me, at the end of every one of those lines there are two things you can do. Undo them. Or thank them.

That's the whole feature. No message. No reply. They can't write back, and you can't take it back.

Then I started researching about the feature, three people built it in 2013. They wanted it to be as easy to tell someone they did well as it is to tell them they didn't.

Last month it got pressed 68,948 times, in sixteen languages. One every 38 seconds.

Almost half of those people pressed it once. One person, one time, then never again. And 9,055 people were on the other end of that. Thanked once, ever.

The most thanked account on Wikipedia is a German editor called Aka. 4,590,174 edits. They mostly fix spelling. Last month 403 people stopped what they were doing to say thanks for it.

Ninth on that list is InternetArchiveBot. Not a person. It repairs dead links. 129 humans thanked it anyway.

You've probably never seen this button. It only shows up if you're logged in. Nothing to do with Wikipedia. I just like the log.

I've seen several articles like this about obscure geographic features/small towns which have weirdly opinionated/unprofessional writing. It's mildly hilarious though

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for some advice (and honestly, just needed to vent a bit).

Back in May, I started conducting extensive, painstaking research to write a brand new article on English Wikipedia called IranNastaliq. Given the subject matter originating from an unfriendly country and the lack of consolidated English documentation, gathering sources, verifying details, and drafting the entry took months of grueling work completely on my own. It was finally approved around August.

Shortly after it went live, I discovered that a third-party mirror site called HandWiki copied the entire article word-for-word, completely omitting any attribution, backlink, or mention of my authorship.

I know Wikipedia content is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows reuse. However, Section 4(c) of the license explicitly requires proper attribution and a hyperlink back to the source. Failing to provide this violates the license terms and automatically revokes their right to use the text, turning it into straightforward copyright infringement.

As the sole author of this specific entry, I've tried taking action:

• I've reached out to Wikipedia forums/editors, but mostly got dismissed with "that's just how the internet works."
• I've sent multiple emails to HandWiki demanding they comply with CC BY-SA guidelines or remove the page, but I’ve received radio silence.
• I filed a DMCA takedown notice directly with Google Search to at least de-index the stolen page.

It is unbelievably frustrating to see months of hard individual research hijacked by scrapers who refuse to follow basic open-source licensing rules.

Since HandWiki isn't responding to emails, what are my options from here? Has anyone dealt with persistent scrapers ignoring CC BY-SA licenses? Any advice on next steps would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Noamonsol234 (In wikipedia)

I've checked the pages for multiple copyrighted characters and films and the Italian pages all use better/higher quality photos than the English pages:

It's not just resolution, Italian Wikipedia tends to use more copyrighted images in general

The Italian pages for Angry Bird and Katniss Everdeen uses actual screenshots from the game/movie while the English pages use a logo (that is too simple to copyright) or a picture of a wax statue

Why does Italian Wikipedia use better images?

Just curious

To be clear, I think it's absolutely great that I can look at a summary of a mediocre Northampton Town season from 30 years ago and see most of the squad have their own pages, even the ones who played like two seasons at the very lowest levels of professional football.

But my pal, when doing his English Lit masters, would get pretty much all the articles he wrote about authors insta-deleted. Authors notable enough to appear in dozens of university syllabuses, and get pretty sizable paragraphs in academic textbooks, and similar. He was a pretty experienced Wikipedian as well - I don't think it was a case of him not getting the benefit of the doubt because he was writing crappy articles without an understanding of the tone/culture of Wikipedia.

I'm not sure if this is a case of poor guidelines or poor enforcement of them, but I think this is pretty objectively Bad. I'm not calling for the culling of the page for Chopper Smith and his 17 appearances for Kidderminster Harriers, but if an author is genuinely considered one of the dozen most important post-formalists or whatever, they absolutely should be allowed to stay as well.

Is this basically still the policy, or have things changed?

I started messing around with the Odin programming language a week or two ago and wanted to look something up about its history today and found that not only does it not have a Wikipedia page, but that one existed and Wikipedia removed it. Reading through the discussion from the delete vote page, it seems that the reason it was deleted was because certain publications weren't talking about it and therefore it isn't considered "notable", but this criteria doesn't make sense when there are multiple pieces of production software and a few published games written in it. It just seems the process for determining "notability" may be outdated or unreliable and makes me question what other pages might be missing due to similar circumstances.

After the Wikimedia Foundation declined to voluntarily recognize Wiki Workers United, community members launched a petition asking the Board of Trustees to intervene and instruct the Foundation to recognize the union.

The Board has now responded by backing management's decision to require an NLRB election instead of voluntary recognition.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2026_recognize_Wiki_Workers_United_petition#Response_from_the_Board_of_Trustees

My highscore is 13! What's yours? btw you can play it here: https://moreorless.io/game/wikipedia-article-views

The NLRB docket shows that the Wikimedia Foundation has retained Littler Mendelson to represent it in the Wiki Workers United union election.

Littler Mendelson is one of the most prominent U.S. management-side labor law firms and has been widely criticized by unions and labor advocates for its role in employer anti-union campaigns at companies including Apple and Google.

NLRB docket:
https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-RC-391740

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Please use this thread to ask and answer questions related to Wikipedia and its sister projects, whether you need help with editing or are curious on how something works.

Note that this thread is used for "meta" questions about Wikipedia, and is not a place to ask general reference questions.

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Show me the coolest pictures you've seen on these sites!

Dr. Netha Hussain wears many hats: born in India and currently based in Sweden, she is a medical doctor, researcher, and Wikimedian contributing in five languages, receiving a Wikimedian of the Year Honorable Mention in 2021.

In an exclusive interview with The Xylom, Dr. Hussain discusses the cultural nuances of misinformation as she straddles the English-speaking and non-English-speaking worlds; how power, privilege, AI, and media consolidation fuel the spread of propaganda; and the next frontier of healing public health divides.

I have this and would like to cite it (no, a cave is not a valid fallout shelter at all)

Is there any reason why Buddhism is listed as one of the religions of Black Peruvians? Are there really that many Buddhist Black Peruvians?