Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single
Part 1: Bernadette Meehan
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- When the Wikimedia Foundation's new CEO was announced on Diff, former US Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan looked like the perfect choice. With all due respect to the WMF's current and past executive directors and CEOs, there has never been one who had the formal qualifications that Meehan has.
- After working for seven years for two New York banks, Meehan started her career in the professional foreign service and worked her way up to be Special Advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then moved to a position at the Obama White House where she served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and then as spokesperson for the National Security Council. In 2015 she was a fellow at the Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She later worked as Executive Director of International Programs and Chief International Officer at the Obama Foundation, before returning to foreign service in 2022 as ambassador to Chile.
- There were a few questions that came up, one I thought quite serious, when I reviewed Meehan's qualifications. Near the middle of the talk page Talk:Bernadette Meehan is a yellow box saying that an undeclared paid editor (UPE) had edited the article. In fact the UPE account had created the article in early 2015 and been blocked as a sockpuppet a few months later. There were 44 other accounts in the sockfarm. Another possible indication of UPE occurred soon after Meehan became a fellow at Georgetown University. An unregistered or "IP" editor, whose IP address geolocates to that university, had added several semi-personal facts to the article. Neither of these sets of edits is proof that Meehan was a UPE or even that she edited with a conflict of interest. But this was serious enough that I should ask her directly. Through the WMF I asked for an interview and then submitted a total of seven written questions about many topics. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to complete the full set of questions before this issue of The Signpost. And Meehan doesn't even start working for the WMF until January 20.
- Amazingly, Meehan sent me an email last Friday introducing her views on the bulk of the questions, and directly answered the most serious question about undeclared paid editing. Part 1 of this interview follows. I hope to publish Part 2 in our next issue. If readers want to contribute to Part 2, please just put your questions in the Comments section below or email me drectly.
Meehan's answers
Hello to The Signpost readers and thank you for reaching out to me! I could not be more excited to join the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly at this moment in time. Wikipedia will celebrate 25 years of existence in January, shortly before I begin my tenure. This role feels like the culmination of many of my prior experiences across the private sector, non-profit sector, and government service, and I am eager to bring these different skills and perspectives to the Wikimedia community. In some ways, it feels like my journey here began even before my professional career, back when I was a high school exchange student in Argentina.
At this pivotal moment in its history, I believe it is vital to bring more awareness and education about the value that the Wikimedia projects bring to the world. Demonstrating why these efforts are so important to the information ecosystem and why, in a moment when generative AI is expanding, the Wikimedia projects are a more essential backbone of the internet than they have ever been before. I hope to play a key role generating awareness, encouraging more people to contribute to these projects, and helping to raise the perspectives and profile of the collective Wikimedia community in the ongoing conversations about policies and issues that affect our projects and people. Any new endeavor is a humbling experience, and I recognize that I have a lot to learn as I take on this role. Therefore, my initial focus will be listening to the community, asking questions, and learning all I can.
Like most subjects of Wikipedia articles, I do not know the user who created the article or who made the other edit you reference. I think your question is a solid example of the Wikipedia model working in practice - every edit in the open, lots of Wikimedians working together to spot and block undisclosed paid editing, and improving the content by removing anything that might not be written from a neutral point of view or be verifiable.
Thank you to The Signpost for the role you play in this ecosystem. I look forward to our engagements and to building our future together!
Afterword
- Thank you, Bernadette and welcome to the WMF and Wikipedia!
- I've taken the liberty of not using your formal title "Madam Ambassador" as it is a tradition among Wikipedians to call WMF CEOs by their first names. Tradition means a lot around here. Among the most important traditions are assume good faith and don't bite the newbies.
- Thank you for giving a direct answer on the UPE/COI question, and for taking your personal time to answer so quickly.
We're gonna have a party!
WMF announces new CEO
Bernadette Meehan's appointment as the new WMF CEO was announced on Diff on December 9, which gives details on her remarkable career which reached a peak in her service as US ambassador to Chile 2022–2025. You can find out where you might meet and talk to her in person on her Around the puzzle globe tour or ask her questions online on the talk page at Meta.
Her CEO appointment follows the announcement in May this year by CEO Maryana Iskander that she would be leaving in early 2026; see here for our coverage at that time. See additional coverage in this issue at Interview and In the media.
Asian Month
Wikipedia Asian Month just concluded, with 55 language Wikipedias participating globally. The WAM campaign has been running since 2015 and encourages language Wikipedias to hold concurrent contests and encourage coverage of Asian topics. The event awards postcards and "Wikipedia Asian Month Golden Award" to editors with the most contribution for each Wiki. Notable wikis with significant participation this year included Assamese, German, Persian, Russian, and Urdu. On the English Wikipedia campaign, 62 editors contributed to 343 articles.
Let's party
Wikipedia turns 25 next month. The big Wikipedia 25th birthday party will be happening on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. The hour-long party will include trivia, prizes, musical performances, data visualization, editor spotlights, guest appearances. Read more and register on Meta-Wiki. You can also check out the other events happening to celebrate this milestone throughout the year.
The event will be live-interpreted in six languages and streamed to Eventyay and Wikipedia's YouTube channel. You can register for the event here to save the date and get updates.
Brief notes
- New administrators: The voting phase of the December 2025 administrator elections ended at 23:59, 15 December 2025 UTC. After scrutineering, results were posted soon after; the new administrators are Epicgenius, The4lines, Left guide, LEvalyn, MPGuy2824, and Yue. Two other candidates were not elected. The Signpost thanks everyone who participated. The customary mop and T-shirt have been awarded.
- New Commons help desk for permissions: the new Permission requests desk on Commons, which reaches out to rightsholders to relicense existing media works for Commons, just had its first success by getting Klima Dashboard to relicense its graphics to CC-BY 4.0. The desk needs more volunteers!
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Spoken language (beginning 15 December), followed by Telecommunications in Kazakhstan (beginning 22 December). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
The "bigg" bosses: Robertsky and the Pope
Wikimedia Foundation wants more AI companies to pay for API access
Reuters reports that the Wikimedia Foundation is "working with Big Tech on deals similar to its arrangement with Google", in order to monetise AI companies' heavy reliance on Wikipedia content.
Speaking in an interview at the Reuters NEXT summit in New York, Wales said that tech companies' usage of freely available Wikipedia knowledge to train their large language models results in cost surges that Wikipedia's nonprofit operator must bear.
While not explicitly mentioned in the Reuters article, Wales was referring to the paid API access offered via the Foundation's for-profit subsidiary Wikimedia LLC as "Wikimedia Enterprise" (see prior Signpost coverage), per the separately published recording of the full interview. (Google was one of its first customers back in 2022, and Wikimedia Enterprise recently reported its "first complete year of profitability" and "that earned revenue has now fully repaid the initial investment in the project" since its inception in 2021.)
Wales said the small donations from the public that form the Foundation's primary source of income were not intended to underwrite the development of multibillion-dollar commercial AI products:
"Wikipedia is supported by volunteers. Those people are donating money to support Wikipedia, and not to subsidize OpenAI costing us a ton of money. That doesn't feel fair."
Asked whether any legal action was being contemplated, Wales replied:
"I don't know. I feel like our ability of soft power to just shame them is probably pretty powerful. Particularly because they are chock full of engineers who love Wikipedia and I don't think their staff are going to like it if ... it just doesn't feel good stealing from babies or Wikipedia."
Bernadette Meehan, due to take over as the new Wikimedia CEO next month, expressed similar sentiments in another Reuters piece:
"Wikipedia content is core to generative AI, but it's often lacking a clear attribution back to Wikimedia sites ... so, core to the conversations that I look forward to having is how to rectify that issue [...] Reuse (of Wikipedia content) is a real challenge. The idea is to help large-scale re-users get the content they need, but in a way that allows all of these Big Tech firms to contribute back to the ecosystem they depend on," Meehan said.
"Because what we don't want to do is change the free and open nature of Wikipedia for everyone else."
The Reuters article quoting Wales was titled "Wikipedia seeks more AI licensing deals similar to Google tie-up, co-founder Wales says". Here "licensing deals" is a rather peculiar wording choice, given that the Wikimedia Foundation does not own the copyright in Wikipedia's content (individual editors do) and thus cannot grant permissions (i.e. licenses) to AI companies for uses that are not already covered by Wikipedia's existing free license. The homepage of Wikimedia Enterprise also clarifies this:
Zero Licensing Fees
Over 99.9% of data available through Wikimedia Enterprise services is under a Creative Commons license, allowing you to put that data to work in the best way for your business.
One can't help noticing a certain conflict of interest on the Reuters journalists' part, given that their own employer was one of the first to strike actual AI licensing deals, more recently followed by other news publishers like CNN and Fox News (whereas several US courts have so far found that training LLM on copyrighted content is largely covered by fair use, a possibility already anticipated by WMF earlier, see our 2024 coverage: "AI policy positions of the Wikimedia Foundation").
Indeed, in his full response to the interview question that gave rise to the Reuters headline, Wales stressed this difference between the Foundation and such publishers, after briefly explaining Wikimedia Enterprise's offerings:
Interviewer: I know you've signed a deal with Google, which now pays you. Are you working on other deals with Big Tech?
Wales: Yeah, we are. So we've got our Enterprise product [where] you can buy a feed from Wikipedia. We actually have the ability to clean it up a bit [by filtering out recent vandalism edits]. [...]
Everything in Wikipedia is open source, freely licensed. [... So] we're in a different position from publishers who also have a lot of copyright concerns. For us, it's really okay, it's freely licensed, but one of the requirements is attribution. Also, just from an ethical point of view, attribution is really important. Like, we teach teenagers this. [...] And the large language models are pretty bad at attribution.
In other parts of the interview Wales discussed the negative impact of AI crawlers in more detail, largely echoing earlier statements by WMF about "How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects". Both in the interview and in those earlier statements it remained unclear how much of this burden is due to "Big Tech" companies such as OpenAI (which professes to respect robots.txt with its "GPTBot" training data crawler), as opposed to smaller AI startups or rogue players. In a technical presentation earlier this year "on how the Wikimedia Foundation has been dealing with the problem of incoming traffic from AI companies' web crawlers", Giuseppe Lavagetto (Principal Site Reliability Engineer at WMF) had noted an "impersonators problem":
The majority of the traffic we see identified as "ChatGPTBot" or "ClaudeBot" or "Meta external agents" is coming from a myriad of small and large cloud providers and is NOT coming from OpenAI or Anthropic. This is true across all major crawlers.
In the presentation, Lavagetto described the strain AI crawlers put on WMF's caching infrastructure and its engineers ("Feels a lot like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole"), but also reported that he and his fellow WMF engineers had been quite successful in addressing it, advising other MediaWiki site owners that "7 magic lines of code will solve most of your crawler problems."
That said, the presentation's reassuring claim that WMF's method of blocking crawlers is "without any disruption to our real users" appears to have been a bit overconfident, considering a subsequent Wikitech-l thread where a longtime Wikipedia editor reported encountering broken images and map links. After some investigation, Lavagetto acknowledged that
"you were most likely caught in one of the filtering rules we've created to respond to [a disruptive AI crawler incident]. I am sorry you got caught up in that traffic, but at the time that was the only option we had to keep serving images to a good portion of asia and the americas."
In Wales' interview this month, he mentioned another possibility of dealing with such issues on a technical level:
Cloudflare's just come out with this product for publishers to block AI crawlers, because there's so many of them and there's so many ways they can do it. We aren't using that yet, [...and] whether we would do it ourselves or with Cloudflare, I don't know, but you know it's the sort of thing that we might consider.
Cloudflare is a company known among website operators for providing services such as protection from DDoS attacks (occasionally also to Wikimedia sites, see Signpost coverage) – and, among web users that Cloudflare suspects of being bots, for disrupting their internet experience with many captcha-like "I am human" checkboxes. Wales was referring to an announcement by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince from earlier this year that his company would repurpose this infrastructure to not just block DDoS attack botnets but also AI crawlers by default, unless their owners pay up in a "marketplace" to be created by Cloudflare – a not entirely unproblematic endeavour, as pointed out by e.g. veteran tech journalist Matthew Ingram ("Does Cloudflare want to protect the web or control it?"). A statement published by Creative Commons last week, while not naming Cloudflare explicitly, likewise raised numerous concerns about such "Pay-to-Crawl" systems.
Perhaps mindful of such concerns, Wales immediately qualified his remark about potentially considering Cloudflare's solution by stating that:
"We're a little bit funny because we're quite ideological about certain things. Free access to knowledge is really important to us. And so when we started the Enterprise product, we started charging for the API, but we have very generous limits for researchers and nonprofits and open source projects and things like that, and we'll continue that. But we do think there are these cases where it's like, "well you're really slamming our servers. You should be using the API and you aren't."
Year in review
Coverage of the most-read articles of 2025 was provided by The Guardian (UK). More audience-specific coverage came from Catholic News Agency, titled "Pope Leo XIV among the most viewed and searched on Wikipedia and Google in 2025".
2025 Wikipedia Year in Review is a personalized "wrapped" style list, only accessed via the Wikipedia mobile app. The feature was covered by Gizmodo, The Verge, techbuzz.ai, and Vice who called it "Fun, Fascinating, and a Little Bit Terrifying". – B
In brief
- Wikimedian of the Year is nominated for Singaporean of the Year: 2025 Wikimedian of the Year Robert Sim is candidate to become Straits Times Singaporean of the Year [1].
- Wikimedia Foundation CEO announcement: Media including Reuters and Economic Times covered the Foundation's appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer. See this issue's News and notes and Interview for more details on the appointment.
- Citation needed, boss (or maybe not): India Today reported that screenshots of an unreferenced change to Bigg Boss (Hindi TV series) season 19 "went viral" [2]. This reporter can only report that the article was edited 703 times in the month ended December 8, the day after the show's finale. Almost 200 of those edits occurred on December 5, the day before the article was semi-protected. Several winners were "announced" in the article during the 4th-5th during edit wars dominated by similarly numbered IP editors. – S
- Blessed encyclopedia: Professor of communications, Fulbright scholar, former Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board member and digital businessperson Ethan Zuckerman has thoughts about Grokipedia [3]. The long-form Prospect piece includes observations of technology and the history of encyclopedias, and in its summary of Grokipedia states that it looks a lot like "the pre-Enlightenment encyclopedias that blurred the voices of contributors and editors into one voice blessed by the church or the monarch".
- More enlightenment, if we could just get past the darn paywall: David Deutsch appears in the conservative UK magazine The Spectator: "David Deutsch: The Enlightenment, 'irrational memes' and how Wikipedia turned woke". Despite the intriguing title, it's very difficult getting around the paywall!
- Continued angst about Gaza-related titles...: "Wikipedia accused of anti-Israel bias for locking page title referring to Israeli massacre" according to Jewish News Syndicate, in reference to Talk:Nuseirat rescue and massacre#WP:MORATORIUM on move discussions.
- ...and related criticism about "foreign influence": John Stossel at RealClearPolitics interviewed Wikipedia critic Ashley Rindsberg. The headline says Wikipedia "Got Captured [by] Leftist Editors & Foreign Influence" (video, with transcript)
- Wiki-Doo, where are you?: Snopes decodes a January 2023 shitpost [4]
Death and stranger things
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Shuipzv3, CAWylie, Vestrian24Bio, Rahcmander and SSSB (plus AndrewPeterT in the Most Edited).
Be running up that road, be running up that hill (November 23 to 29)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dharmendra |  |
2,021,320 |  |
Two weeks after this veteran Indian actor was admitted to hospital and false reports of his death were circulated on social media and news channels, he died on November 24, aged 89. |
| 2 | Stranger Things season 5 | |
1,918,188 |  |
Netflix is about to finish one of their most successful shows, calling back to many 1980s productions by returning to that decade and following a bunch of teenagers dealing with their small Indiana town being an opening to a dark dimension that keeps pouring out horrible monsters. Our streaming overlords chose an unusual release system, as instead of all episodes at once or one every week, it will be four before U.S. Thanksgiving, three on Christmas, and the series finale on New Year's Eve. |
| 3 | Stranger Things | |
1,263,457 | ||
| 4 | Deaths in 2025 |  |
1,012,633 |  |
I used this song once before, but Jimmy Cliff died this week, so in honor of him... And I keep on fighting for the things I want Though I know that when you're dead you can't But I'd rather be a free man in my grave Than living as a puppet or a slave... |
| 5 | Wicked: For Good |  |
1,010,546 |  |
Sequel to Wicked, second part of the two-part adaption of the 2003 musical, which itself was based on the 1995 novel, which was a revisionism of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation, portraying the Wonderful Wizard of Oz antagonist while shedding light on Elphaba Thropp aka the Wicked Witch of the West continues its theatrical run nearing the $400 million mark in worldwide Box Office collection. |
| 6 | Millie Bobby Brown | |
699,293 |  |
The Eleven of #2/#3. 10 years after filming season 1, she's 21, married to the son of Jon Bon Jovi, with an adopted daughter, and is prepared to return as Enola Holmes after starring in quite a money sink. How much they grow. |
| 7 | Zootopia 2 | |
697,988 |  |
Along with #3, 2016 also introduced the world to Zootopia (or Zootropolis in some countries), a highly successful Disney animation about a city of talking animals, whose achievements included over a billion dollars at the box office and an Academy Award. A sequel came out, again following rabbit policewoman Judy Hopps and a fox who she brought into the Force, Nick Wilde, as after a snake attacks they go on to discover why the city has all kinds of mammals but few reptiles. Reviews were positive, and Zootopia 2 opened to a massive $525 million worldwide, so surpassing the latest Demon Slayer movie and matching Chinese movie Ne Zha 2 in making over a billion is highly probable. |
| 8 | ChatGPT | |
696,634 | .png){kind=small} |
This contraption is still here; we are left to wonder how much our views fell because people decided to do research through it instead. |
| 9 | Pluribus (TV series) | |
690,415 | .jpg) |
While Netflix dominates the streaming world the tech giant trying to gain momentum in the streaming world has returned this fall with a new post-apocalyptic science fiction series. It follows author Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn), who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of "the Joining", resulting from an extraterrestrial virus that turned humans into a peaceful and content hive mind (the "Others"). |
| 10 | Sawyer Sweeten |  |
631,511 |  |
On November 24, CBS aired a special celebrating 30 years of Everybody Loves Raymond (one year too early, given it debuted in September 1996). The show had a tribute to Sweeten, the portrayer of Geoffrey Barone, whose on-screen siblings were also his real life sister and twin. He took his own life in April 2015, days before his 20th birthday. |
And so we hold each other tightly, and hold on for tomorrow (November 30 to December 6)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026 FIFA World Cup | |
1,698,819 |  |
Six teams aren't closed in yet, but a draw for the 48 football squads that will play all over North America was held in Washington, D.C., featuring some head-scratching things like a "FIFA Peace Prize" being presented to Donald Trump and a performance by the Village People. The three hosts got relatively easy groups, as along with European teams to be determined there will be South Africa and South Korea for Mexico, Qatar and Switzerland for Canada, and Paraguay and Australia for the US. |
| 2 | Stranger Things season 5 | |
1,380,187 | |
The show that provides a nostalgic throwback to adventure and horror movies of the 80s started its final season, showing in 1987 the city of Hawkins quarantined so the military can investigate the "Upside Down" attached to it, the protagonists seeking the ruler of said dark dimension Vecna, and Vecna in turn ordering the kidnapping of children, including the sister of Mike Wheeler. Netflix's unusual release scheme means some upcoming Christmas and New Year's parties might also have viewings of episodes set for the 25th and the 31st. |
| 3 | Stranger Things | |
1,150,109 | ||
| 4 | Lane Kiffin | |
1,088,664 |  |
These stories always surprise me, because in the UK nobody cares about college/university sports (because our professional sports teams don't hold drafts for university graduates). But in the US, it is big business. This college American football coach is moving from Ole Miss Rebels football to rivals LSU Tigers football. |
| 5 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,022,970 | .jpg)
|
15 there's still time for you Time to buy, Time to lose yourself Within a morning star 15 I'm all right with you 15, there's never a wish better than this When you only got 100 Years to live... |
| 6 | Raj & DK | |
920,208 |  |
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna Dasarakothapalli, collectively credited as Raj & DK, are an Indian filmmaker duo known for their work as writers, directors, and producers in Hindi cinema. Their notable works include Netflix's Guns & Gulaabs and two Prime Video releases, The Family Man and Citadel: Honey Bunny, in which they worked with Samantha Ruth Prabhu - who Raj married at Linga Bhairavi temple inside Isha Yoga center in Coimbatore. |
| 7 | Millie Bobby Brown | |
891,781 | .jpg) |
This British actress had only a few TV roles, including a young Alice in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, when #3 made her a star playing the superpowered Eleven. Aside from helping Godzilla in two movies, Millie basically only worked with Netflix in the past 9 years, including two upcoming movies: one more go as the sister of Sherlock Holmes in Enola Holmes 3, and the romantic comedy Just Picture It. |
| 8 | Dhurandhar | |
852,710 |  |
This Bollywood spy action thriller film written, directed, and co-produced by Aditya Dhar starring Ranveer Singh in the lead role, is inspired by the real-life incidents, geopolitical conflicts, and covert operations of India's intelligence agency Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) with local gangs and crime syndicates in the Lyari area of Karachi, Pakistan. The first instalment of a two-part series was released last week and opened to mixed-to-positive reviews from critics. The second instalment is currently scheduled for a release in March 2026. |
| 9 | Zootopia 2 | |
829,805 |  |
While Warner Bros. couldn't make a profit despite positively received and acclaimed releases and decided to sell off to the streaming giant who will become the undisputed king of streaming once Netflix merges with HBO Max, which is highly likely to happen soon after the acquisition; Disney continues ruling the theatres despite what critics and online haters say (double when it involves the MCU). The sequel to 2016's Zootopia, still featuring a buddy cop story involving a rabbit and a fox investigating a conspiracy, was released two weeks ago on the occasion of U.S. Thanksgiving and has so far grossed $916 million in just two weeks, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2025; proving to the world once again that Disney is the king of Thanksgiving releases. |
| 10 | ChatGPT | |
782,673 |  |
The way too-early Wikimedia Foundation retrospective of 2025's most viewed (December is still part of the year!) put the chatbot among the excluded pages, and this validates how we'll soon do this as well. |
Tell me, tell me the story, the one about eternity, and the way it's all gonna be (December 7 to 13)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dhurandhar | |
3,887,727 | .jpg) |
This Bollywood spy action thriller film written, directed, and co-produced by Aditya Dhar is inspired by real-life incidents, geopolitical conflicts such as 1999 Indian plane hijack, 2001 Indian Parliament attack, 2008 Mumbai attacks, and Operation Lyari; and covert operations of India's intelligence agency Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) with local gangs and crime syndicates in the Lyari area of Karachi, Pakistan. The first instalment of a two-part series was released this month and opened to mixed-to-positive reviews from critics but became a Box Office hit grossing ₹556.65 crore (US$66 million) against a budget of ₹280 crore (US$33 million) to emerge as the second highest grossing Hindi film of 2025 and the third highest-grossing Indian film of 2025 as of this report. The second instalment which was shot together is currently scheduled for a release in March 2026.
The film's main cast include: Ranveer Singh as Hamza Ali Mazari (undercover of Jaskirat Singh Rangi); Akshaye Khanna as #2; R. Madhavan as Ajay Sanyal, Director of the Intelligence Bureau (based on Ajit Doval); Sanjay Dutt as SP Chaudhary Aslam of Lyari Task Force; Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal (based on Ilyas Kashmiri); Rakesh Bedi as Jameel Jamali, senior politician from Pakistan Awami Party and a Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan (based on Nabil Gabol); and Sara Arjun (seen to the left with Singh) as Yalina Jamali, Jameel's daughter and Hamza's love interest and later wife. |
| 2 | Rehman Dakait |  |
1,274,624 |  |
This Pakistani gangster, leader of the Baloch Gang and founder of the People's Aman Committee is portrayed by Akshaye Khanna in the above. |
| 3 | Lando Norris | |
1,207,470 |  |
And the Driver's Champion for this year's F1 World Championship is won by this British driver, driving for McLaren, which was also the Constructors' Champion. His first title, Norris clinched the title by finishing third at the final race of the season at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which got him enough points to edge out the race winner and four-time champion Max Verstappen. Norris' teammate Oscar Piastri finished second in the race and third in the season. |
| 4 | Philip Rivers | |
1,026,667 |  |
For 13 years, 2006–2019, Rivers was the successful starting quarterback for the San Diego Chargers, being named to the Pro Bowl eight times. After parting ways with the Chargers, he played for the Indianapolis Colts in 2020 before retiring at the age of 39. In July he signed a ceremonial one-day contract with the Chargers to retire with that franchise, and he was set to be a semifinalist for the Hall of Fame in 2026 after the mandatory five-year retirement period. However, following injuries to Colts starting quarterback Daniel Jones and backup Riley Leonard, the 44-year old Rivers, a grandfather, is coming out of retirement. |
| 5 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,022,745 | .jpg) |
Wake up on a lifetime, hold up your own head Well you may get a pardon and then you might drop dead |
| 6 | Sean Combs |  |
979,683 |  |
2025 had two documentaries on the rapper whose unsavory behavior sent him to prison, and even if he asked for a presidential pardon, if it doesn't happen he'll stay incarcerated until May 2028: in January Peacock got the film Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy, and December added the miniseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning to Netflix. |
| 7 | Sherrone Moore | |
932,962 | .jpg) |
In 2024, Moore was named football head coach at University of Michigan, presiding over winning records both years of his tenure. However, on December 10, Moore was fired due to credible evidence that he had an affair with a staff member. Soon after his firing was announced, Moore was arrested and charged with home invasion, breaking and entering, and stalking, with the victim being the female staff member he had been in a relationship with for several years. |
| 8 | ChatGPT | |
791,609 |  |
Time chose as the Person of the Year "The Architects of AI" developing things such as this chatbot at an alarmingly fast rate. |
| 9 | Wake Up Dead Man | |
749,152 |  |
The third installment in the Knives Out film series, once again directed by Rian Johnson with Daniel Craig returning as the master detective Benoit Blanc, now trying to investigate the death of a foul-mouthed Monsignor played by Josh Brolin. After some festival showings and a limited theatrical release, it hit Netflix alongside great reviews (although this here writer preferred predecessors Knives Out and Glass Onion for being more comedic, and would've appreciated the eponymous U2 song playing in the movie). |
| 10 | It – Welcome to Derry | |
736,958 | .jpg) |
HBO continues this supernatural horror series that is a prequel to 2017's It and 2019's It Chapter Two (and of course, Stephen King's 1986 novel aside from the time frame), still with Bill Skarsgård as the trans-dimensional malevolent entity who preys upon the children (and sometimes adults) of Derry, Maine, roughly every 27 years, using a variety of supernatural powers including the abilities to shapeshift (mostly into that monster clown known as Pennywise) and manipulate reality. The first season set in 1962, 26 years before the first film, aired its season finale on the Sunday after this report. A second season set in 1935, 27 years prior, is in development and hopefully given the show's positive reception and viewership whoever buys off Warner Bros. Discovery decides to continue It. |
Exclusions
- These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.
Most edited articles
For the November 15 – December 15 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths in 2025 | 2217 | Even if he didn't enter the top 10s above, Udo Kier also died in the period, and he had quite a career. |
| Analytic philosophy | 1973 | Wait, a non-Chinese philosophy article for a change? Also, the edits are the work of one MisterCake. |
| Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 9 | 1272 | One of the Indian versions of Big Brother is still rolling. |
| Wozzeck | 1062 | MONTENSEM keeps on working on the article about this opera. |
| Multinational Force – Ukraine | 930 | A proposed peacekeeping coalition force that would be deployed in Ukraine, led by the UK and France. But of course for it to happen the war needs to stop. |
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A feast of holidays and carols
- This article first appeared two years ago in The Signpost. Last year a couple of the staff here liked it enough to ask me to resubmit it. This year, I didn't even wait for an invitation. I just really love Christmas carols. Of course I had to make a few changes, and I'll make more next year if I get the chance again. Please post some of your own favorite carols in the section for comments, along with any holiday wishes or Christmas cards you like. I'll try to include some of these next year. Happy holidays! – S
I love Christmas carols, especially the old ones. Charles Dickens's story A Christmas Carol is not that old — first published in 1843 — but is written in the form of a "Christmas carol in prose", according to the title page. Its chapters are even called staves. In the first stave, a passing caroler sings a small snippet of an old carol to Scrooge. Do you know the Christmas carol sung in A Christmas Carol?
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" goes back to the 1650s, but songs have been associated with mid-winter holidays for over 2,000 years. For example, the Roman holiday Saturnalia was associated with song, as well as wine and political incorrectness — though it should not be confused with Bacchanalia. There's even a modern Saturnalia song, sung in Latin, titled "Io, Saturnalia" (In English: "Yo, Saturnalia") which might be better to skip.
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Carols are not necessarily religious, but they are almost always happy music you can dance to. "O Tannenbaum" means "Oh, fir tree" in German but is usually translated into English as "Oh, Christmas Tree". Other than the word "Christmas", the song has little to do with religion. It just praises the fir tree's "faithfulness" — its ability to stay green all Winter. In German, in French, and in both Dutch and English.
Religious carols
My favorite religious carols include:
"Good King Wenceslas" — celebrates the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen, and emphasizes the importance of charity (and gift-giving in general).
"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" — a song that has lyrics from a poem of the same name, and is a very intellectual expression of the author's personal interpretation of the meaning of Christmas. It may mark his joy at the announcement of peace ending the Mexican–American War.
"O Holy Night" — sends a similar message.
Ramsey Lewis gives a jazz version of "We Three Kings".
To fully appreciate "O come all ye faithful", you need to hear it in a large, packed church with a powerful organ belting it out on Christmas Eve. The original Latin version, Adeste Fideles, can be even more powerful. Strangely, though I only know a few words of Latin, I always think of it as Venite Adoremus from the words in the chorus that translate to "Oh come let us adore (him)".
The explanation is the quirky, sprightly carol "The Snow Lay On the Ground", which also uses the words venite adoremus. The lyrics are attributed to a 19th-century Italian folk song, but three quarters of the time you just sing venite adoremus.
Another folk song, an African-American spiritual, "Go Tell It on the Mountain", is an expression of pure joy. It was first mentioned in 1901, and published in 1909.
B.B. King doesn't hold back either.
The ultimate "Christmas Song" is sung and played here by some of the best musicians on this page, including by the composer. [5]
Here is another great December song.
Diverse points of view
Modern Christmas carols and songs express many of the same themes as the earlier carols, adapted to the current state of the world. But I'm not going to link to "All I Want for Christmas is You" — you know where to find it, and you know that you have heard it enough already this year.
There are also many people who live in different circumstances in other countries, who celebrate different winter holidays, and worship in different faiths. Nobody should be left out at this time of year. We are sorry that there is not enough time to cover everybody's circumstances.
"Silver Bells" brings great memories of "Christmastime in the city". But I also have mixed feelings on its message. Is it meant to honor the Salvation Army? Or is it just an advertisement for the modern commercialized holiday that seems to start in October? Or maybe it is just a great song, in a bad movie, starring an even worse comedian?
There is no doubt that Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas" is a great song. But sometimes I wonder if it has anything to do with Christmas.
José Feliciano's song [6] "Feliz Navidad" causes no such mixed feelings. A little bit of repetition never hurt a Christmas song.
Russia and Ukraine both have long traditions of celebrating Christmas and New Year's Day. And they share some of them.
В лесу родилась ёлочка ("In the woods is born a fir tree") is a Russian children's New Year's song. It mirrors Oh, Christmas Tree but includes a cute little bunny, an angry wolf, and most kiddy videos include Father Frost (a Slavic Santa Claus).
The music to this little Christmas dance was written by a gay Russian composer whose grandfather was born in Ukraine.
Do not be fooled by a bit of chaos at the start to this video of Ukrainian carolers.
These shared traditions only make the current war more tragic.
There are other tragedies happening right now that involve different religions that share, in part, a common heritage.
You might think it would be difficult finding a Jewish Christmas carol, but a song often called "The best selling Christmas song of all time" was written by Irving Berlin, a Jew.
Hanukkah songs include "The Dreidel Song", "8 Days (Of Hanukkah)" by Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings [7], and "Hanukkah Rocks" [8] by The LeeVees (the last two links are to NPR's Tiny Desk Concert).
You might think there are no Muslim Christmas songs, but you'd be wrong. Muslims are allowed to borrow the Christmas carols they like and even compose their own, just like anybody else. This is the view put forward in these two thought-provoking videos.
We're lucky this year to have two songs from Palestinians in Bethlehem, the first one borrowed from the west and sung in English and Arabic. The second song is sung in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, with some lyrics in English and commentary in German.
2025 has been a difficult year all around the world. It has even been difficult for Wikipedia. I'm afraid some people might read this article and complain it is "liberal propaganda". How would I respond? I hope I'd answer in the best traditions of Wikipedia. I'd hope to follow a lesson from the real person who this holiday season is generally named for. I hope I'd respond with this song.
We all share part of our common human heritage. We all share in our common human tragedy.
Michal Lewi (Iwelam) and Alan R. King (A R King)
Alan R. King was a British linguist notable for his work on minority languages Basque and Nawat. Most of his contributions were in 2006 and 2007 when he did considerable work on Nawat grammar, Basque grammar, Rama language and Miskito grammar. These are specialized complex articles on esoteric topics that few people in the world are qualified for. King spoke and communicated in English, Welsh, French, Basque, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Nawat, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Yiddish and Lenca – he has written a number of books including The Basque Language: A Practical Introduction and Colloquial Basque.
Michal Lewi (Iwelam)
Lewi died on 12 October 2025 at the age of 94. He edited mainly during 2015 on topics related to Australia and the Czech Republic. He was professionally involved in cultural and natural preservation in Western Australia. Obituary: "Obituary: Michal Lewi (1931–2025)". Government of Western Australia. 29 October 2025.
List of xxtreme sports (redirected from Electrojousting)
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- This article is a Featured List, and has been selected by reviewers as representing Wikipedia's best content. Don't fuck with it!
Xxtreme sports[1] are a loosely-defined subcategory of extreme sports possessing a substantially increased risk of death or severe injury, even when performed correctly. While some xxtreme sports (like gladiator combat) date back to ancient times, the majority emerged towards the end of the 2050s, developing alongside advanced modern medical techniques.
Historically, xxtreme sports were heavily restricted on Earth by safety regulations (as well as laws against murder and suicide), although recently[needs update] many of them[which?] have been legalized in a growing list[idiotic] of countries.[citation needed] The destructiveness of modern sports has been attributed[by whomst?] to the low cost of modern procedures for skeletal, muscular, and tissue printing, as well as full-body rejuvenation and replacement.[citation needed]
The Xxtremelympic Xxommittee, headquartered in the Mare Tranquilitatis Special Economic Leisure Zone, holds the annual Lunar Gamezz; it also provides rulesets and specifications, and administers official leagues for several team-based xxtreme sports. However, the Xxommittee is not an objective arbiter of which activities count as xxtreme sports; many games and events conducted outside the Xxommittee's purview are nonetheless widely considered to fall under the description.
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"Uh, no, I mean, I can't actually dance in it, do you have any idea how long it took to align all the layers to look right on mobile? In fact, tell him to not stand so close, it's fucking up the margin."