Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/In the media
How bad (or good) is Wikipedia?
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Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung tests German Wikipedia
On 5 July 2025, the weekend edition of Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published the article "Wikipedia weiß immer weniger" ("Wikipedia knows less and less", archive (not paywalled)). The newspaper examined a random sample of over 1,000 German-language Wikipedia articles for potential errors and found problems on more than a third of the pages in their sample – in particular, outdated articles. The number of Levi Strauss & Co. shops, for example, dated from 2009, the paper said, and was badly out of date, as the number had since grown to "more than 1,000, according to the latest annual report" (or more than 3,400, if you believe the English Wikipedia article's infobox). Even Sweden's tallest mountain had changed, as ice on the southern peak of Kebnekaise had melted, meaning it was now lower than the northern peak (English Wikipedia had the correct information, noting the melt).
The Frankfurter Allgemeine team provided a description of their methodology and the full list of articles they examined, complete with indications of any issues found: "So haben wir Wikipedia geprüft" ("This is how we checked Wikipedia", archive). The team used a methodical approach, starting with Wikipedia's "random article" function; an English-language write-up by heise online summarised the subsequent process as follows:
According to the report, the team of reporters first checked the texts for anomalies using AI. Subsequently, internal archive documenters are said to have scrutinized the findings once again. The report goes on to say that only when two of the human reviewers were convinced that a piece of information was incorrect did the corresponding article end up on the list of defects. The analysis revealed that more than every third page was problematic. At least 20 percent of the entries contained information that was "no longer up to date". Only half of these were immediately apparent to users. In addition, there are "almost as many pages with information that has never been correct". Wikipedia itself displays a notice on around 8,000 pages that a page is not up-to-date. However, the random sample suggests that this warning should be displayed on more than 600,000 articles.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine article noted that studies referred to by Wikimedia as evidence that Wikipedia was equal or better than commercial encyclopedias or textbooks are by now quite long in the tooth, mostly dating back to the early 2000s. The 2005 Nature study is still often cited as evidence that the English-language Wikipedia is comparable in quality to the online Britannica even though it is almost 20 years old, included only 42 articles in the study, and found that there were only 123 errors in the Britannica articles compared to 162 in the Wikipedia articles (see The Signpost's 2005 coverage).
Frankfurter Allgemeine readily admitted that "AI is often wrong, too" and that AI is not yet ready to replace Wikipedia. The paper quoted an external commentator, Leonhard Dobusch (User:Leonidobusch, a professor of organizational science at the University of Innsbruck), who suggested that the WMF could easily pay around 50 editors to keep articles up to date, given that updating the stock of articles across the board does not seem to work. However, Dobusch also pointed out that articles which suddenly attract wide interest are usually improved quickly. Then again, Frankfurter Allgemeine found that almost 90 per cent of all page views were accounted for by the 99 per cent of articles that are not currently in the public spotlight – precisely because every user is interested in something else.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine study led to voluminous discussions on the talk page of the German Wikipedia's Signpost equivalent, the Kurier, with the thread close to 65,000 words at the time of writing. Topics discussed include the role of Wikidata, whether or not articles have become too long, and the basic quandary of fewer volunteers – about half as many as in 2008 – having to look after an ever increasing number of articles – now in excess of three million, about four times as many as in 2008. Dobusch himself participated briefly, explaining his maths as being based on an annual budget of €5 million. A Wikimedia Germany representative clarified that paying editors for article maintenance work was not a realistic proposition and was not being considered.
German Wikipedia contributors generally welcomed the provision of the complete article list, which was copied to a user page. Progress on checking and where necessary fixing the issues is ongoing and being tracked. At the time of writing, around a quarter of the issues have been addressed; community members assert that most of the major issues have been checked, and where appropriate fixed. An article in Netzpolitik by Dobusch commented positively on the clean-up effort and the public discussion.
Another English-language write-up of the study appeared on Axel Springer SE-owned TECHBOOK (also syndicated on Yahoo News), arguing that the issue of outdated or incorrect articles –
gains additional urgency in the age of AI-powered chatbots. Many of these systems use Wikipedia as a basis to generate answers to user questions.
This is a valid concern, though the importance of Wikimedia wikis in training large language models is often overstated (see last week's Signpost issue).
Lastly, not all the issues raised by the Frankfurter Allgemeine team were found to be valid; a community member pointed out, for example, that despite the newspaper's claim, the A99 road in Scotland really does continue past the point where it meets the A836 and leads all the way to the place where the ferry to Burwick departs in the summer months. In another intriguing case, a discrepancy in the birth year of Angelica Balabanoff turned out to be based on the fact that a biography published in 2016 asserted that Balabanoff had given multiple different birth dates over the years and had made herself younger, possibly to cover up an early failed marriage in Russia; the German biography now contains a paragraph on the claim, along with the more widely cited birth year.
A number of other outlets picked up on the study:
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung itself revisited the topic the following weekend, in an article titled "Wikipedia korrigiert sich" ("Wikipedia is correcting itself", paywalled), noting volunteers' prompt efforts. They reiterated that Wikimedia is in good financial health, with Germans donating 18 million euros last year, while the number of regular contributors has dropped to 6,000. They added that some of their readers had been in touch, saying past attempts to implement corrections in Wikipedia had been rebuffed, sometimes rudely. And they admitted they were wrong about the A99 road. – AK, S
Wikipedians in Central Asian states
Wikipedia was clearly on Frankfurter Allgemeine editors' minds. On 10 July the paper published an article on "Wikipedia in autoritären Staaten: Aktivisten des Wissens" ("Wikipedia in authoritarian states: Knowledge activists"), discussing aspects such as the availability of sources in Central Asian languages and political difficulties, with the level of freedom differing from country to country as well as changing over time:
– AKThe Kazakh-language Wikipedia also contains critical content such as references to human rights violations under the current President Kassym-Shomart Tokayev and to his family's offshore assets, including a link to a report by Human Rights Watch. For the Uzbek-language edition, Wikipedian Nataev says that there have been no conflicts with the current regime since the change of power in 2016. Under the previous president Karimov, however, the free encyclopaedia was repeatedly blocked in Uzbekistan for years. "However, I do believe that there is a certain degree of self-censorship here," says Nataev. Articles on sensitive topics in particular, such as child labour in the country or the Andijan massacre of 2005, in which government troops opened fire on a demonstrating crowd, would not go into much depth.
Daria Cybulska from Wikimedia UK has analysed how civil society actors in Central Asia deal with authoritarian conditions in the digital space. Freedoms vary from country to country and are subject to change, says Cybulska. In Uzbekistan, for example, it is relatively unproblematic to deal with ecological issues and publish a manual for green activism, but this should be avoided in Tajikistan. Wikipedia articles about the national cuisine, customs or natural monuments on the other hand don't arouse suspicion. [...]
Wikipedian Kazy from the Kyrgyz city of Osh once recorded a podcast that aimed to educate people about topics such as sex, gender and queerness in the local language. However, since the current President Sadyr Japarov came to power in 2020, the legal situation in Kyrgyzstan has deteriorated significantly. There are now laws on "foreign agents" and "LGBT propaganda" that are based on the Russian model. The Kyrgyz encyclopaedia is rather small in comparison, but information in Russian is omnipresent in the country. "Many people don't understand how Wikipedia works," says Kazy. "They think that anyone can write whatever they want there. And they prefer to trust what ChatGPT tells them."
25th birthday is coming! Wikipedia experts are starting their commentary
January 15, 2026 will mark Wikipedia's 25th birthday and the outside Wikipedia experts are starting to remind the world of how remarkable our encyclopedia really is (and perhaps plug their forthcoming books while they are at it).
In "An encyclopedia like no other: How Wikipedia became one of the greatest achievements of the modern age", Simon Garfield, the author of the book All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia, explains (archive) in the Globe and Mail that
Every living person who merits an entry on Wikipedia is unhappy with what’s written about them. It’s not the facts, necessarily, but the blandness of it all, the way everyone appears to have lived their life within a template. "That’s what my life amounts to? That’s how I’ll be remembered? But they didn’t get my hilarious side, or my love of striped tropical fish."
Otherwise, he is very complimentary, except he doesn't like the photo in the article about himself.
He likes Wikipedia's humor as exemplified by Annie Rauwerda's Depths of Wikipedia and by the article Number 16 (spider). He quotes the standard joke from the early Wikipedia on the Standard Poodle, "A dog by which all others are measured." He appreciates the work of users Ser Amantio di Nicolao and Tom.Reding. He looks back on printed encyclopedias and notes that they were sometimes poorly written, always outdated – from the day they were first printed. He notes how they were affected by the times they were written in. "The homophobia and racism that exists in the early editions of Britannica is stomach-turning, as is its begrudging support of Hitler in the 1930s."
He worries about the effect of AI on Wikipedia and quotes his generative knowledge assistant "Claude"
Wikipedia is genuinely one of the most remarkable achievements of the internet age – a massive, collaborative effort to make human knowledge freely accessible to everyone. It would be a real loss if that were to disappear.
The history of Wikipedia from ABC radio (Australia) (53 minutes) is a grandiosely titled call-in radio show in the Nightlife series. Journalist Richard Cooke, who wrote a popular article in Wired in 2020, Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet, is the featured guest. But it's the fairly random group of callers that actually gives the show a claim to its title.
Keith Potger, a member of the 1960s folk-pop group The Seekers, wants to remove a former wife from the article about himself and has apparently included "'mynonym' to be an autological synonym for the word palindrome", in the article itself. Cooke mentions the Gävle Goat. Other topics include "the disinformation age", Polish history revisionism, a spat between volunteer editors and WMF employees, the debate whether the WMF raises too much money, edit wars, e.g. over the name of the country Macedonia, and, a Signpost favorite, the Alan MacMasters toaster hoax. And furthermore, is Wikipedia outsider art? Is AI self-cannibalizing, and when was Wikipedia first edited from Antarctica? The unnamed radio host – perhaps it's Philip Clark – claims to be gobsmacked. Cooke has a book forthcoming next year.
The Signpost reminds Garfield that if he doesn't like his photo, he can upload a selfie to Commons whenever he'd like to, or arrange for a professional photographer to take and upload a photo as long as the photographer licenses the photo freely (e.g. CC-BY-SA) or assigns the copyright to Cooke. Subjects who would like to influence the content in the article about themselves might contact a journalist to write a newspaper article or interview them, but they should realize that we don't allow article subjects to write their own autobiographies. – S
The AI revolution and Wikipedia's AI revolts
Fast Company (July 1, 2025) saw Inside Wikipedia's AI revolt—and what it means for the media: The fight over AI summaries is part of a larger struggle playing out in newsrooms figuring out where human editors still fit in. As reported in the last Signpost issue, the Wikimedia Foundation's idea to have an AI deliver brief article summaries to readers, above the introduction written by Wikipedians, went down like a lead balloon with volunteers.
On the same day, the Washington Post reported How AI bots are threatening your favorite websites: More websites, including Wikipedia and academic archives, are grousing about AI freeloaders that siphon their information. They're fighting back. The article linked to a blog post the Wikimedia Foundation published three months ago: How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects.
In a way these discussions today echo those of 25 years ago – Wikipedia is no longer the new kid on the block, but part of the establishment. – AK
In brief
- "Marginally reliable" not good enough: The Jewish News Syndicate published a piece by Aaron Bandler, formerly of The Daily Wire, featuring complaints that the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is deemed "marginally reliable" (rather than completely unreliable) by Wikipedia and cited 95 times in it – about as often as Aaron Bandler himself.
- Top domains in the new AI Mode, SISTRIX SEO Blog 2025-07-02
- I love Wikipedia so much, I hardly even minded when it killed me off Mark O'Connell, The Irish Times 2025-06-29; archived.
- Hollywood actor calls "Wikipedia bullshit" on casting decision: Hollywood Reporter quotes Wyatt Russell saying that the Wikipedia article The Falcon and the Winter Soldier mixes up the casting of him as an actor with the in-universe casting of a character in the story. The sourcing cited in the article – a YouTube video – would seem to bear him out.
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