Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-10-13/In the media
A(I)pocalypses afoot
"AI is quietly cannibalizing its own supply chain" – including Wikipedia
.jpg)
Spiceworks published an article that concludes "AI is quietly cannibalizing its own supply chain" of human curated information, including Wikipedia, used to train models. Spiceworks' interest? They are concerned that at some point, as AI search engines regurgitate more and more AI-derived information, and users shortcut the venues that would have resulted in corpora of interaction in the past, now users won't be able to do searches for technical help – hence the title "Is AI quietly killing the forums and wikis your IT team relies on?"
Separately, Adweek drives a similar point, in an interview of a Wikimedia Foundation executive. The Adweek article, "Inside Wikipedia's Plan to Survive the Answer Engine Apocalypse", says "ubiquity without attribution is an existential threat" to Wikipedia posed by AI driven search engine previews (like AI Overviews).
Trillion dollar freeloaders?
Ina Fried, writing in Axios, identifies Anthropic and OpenAI as conspicuously absent from the public list of companies who pay for Wikimedia Enterprise, the production-level AI model training data access offered by the Wikimedia Foundation. The article does not clarify whether these companies are using database downloads or cached data, pay for access and don't discuss it, or simply scrape queries and freeload. Non-human traffic, including the scrapers used by some to acquire AI training data, accounted for 65% of cache misses in 2025.[a] – B, BR
Rogue AI attempting to access Wikimedia infrastructure
On October 5, The Verge reported on unauthorized automated access to Wikimedia Foundation assets including
edits to Wikimedia wikis, "unsuccessful attempts" to "exploit" the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation hosts, and heavy traffic that the foundation says "may" have contributed to a partial outage that happened in May…
— Jay Peters, The Verge, "Wikipedia operator says OpenAI's 'rogue' bots may be linked to a May outage", October 5, 2026
Ars Technica followed with their own story the next day, characterizing the access of Wikimedia Foundation assets, collectively with access to other sites, as "actions that would likely result in criminal charges being filed had human hackers taken them".
Other coverage included Reuters and The Telegraph.
See this issue's News from Diff for the Foundation's announcement of the incident. – B
Retired judge says a Corrections employee referenced Wikipedia for an execution dose
In 2022 the Arizona Department of Corrections "shortly before" executing a prisoner sent "a directive from a superior to an underling saying, 'Look up in Wikipedia to see what the appropriate dose should be.'"
That's according to retired U.S. Magistrate Judge David Duncan who was quoted by NPR in an "exclusive interview". Two other sources, Mother Jones and Death Penalty Info have given similar reports. These execution(s) were supervised by Frank Strada, then Deputy Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2022.
Last week as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, Strada supervised the botched execution of Christa Pike, and then quickly announced his retirement. According to Pike's attorney "Parts of the (execution) protocols for both states are written down. And you can see that some of the sections are word-for-word identical."
Duncan should know what he is talking about. He was hired by Arizona's governor in 2023 to review questions about Arizona's system of execution and had access to internal documents and interviewed about 50 corrections employees. He was fired by the governor just before his report was to be released for exceeding the instructions he was given.
The Wikipedia article most likely referred to in Duncan's quote still included drug doses until this Friday, October 9, as did a few other related articles. In fact two sets of doses were given in the most likely article: the first was for orally administered doses given for physician assisted suicide, the second for intravenously administered execution.
According to Wikipedia's Manual of Style/Medicine related articles:
Do not include dose, titration or pricing information except when they are extensively discussed by secondary sources ... Wikipedia is not an instruction manual or textbook and should not include instructions, advice (medical or otherwise) or "how-to's".
Other than this disregard of the Manual of Style/Medicine, this reporter could find little or no evidence of rule-breaking by Wikipedia editors.
(See this 2017 Signpost article on a related topic)
– S
In brief
- Wiki rabbitholes discovered in Pendleton and Umatilla: According to the East Oregonian, you can find rabbit holes almost everywhere. Author Billie Corsetti estimates that it only takes a minute for her to get distracted and click another blue link, leading to hours spent on Wikipedia.
- Fun Philly Fringe: A show at the Philly Fringe Festival was somewhat reminiscent of Annie Rauwerda's Depths of Wikipedia shows emphasizing the odd things and rabbit holes you might run into on Wikipedia. The significant difference is that the presenters, academics Noam Osband and Anna Apostolidis, play fairly low key popular style songs with nerdy and horny lyrics. (None of the Philly Fringe show's songs seem to remain on YouTube but you can get an idea here. (Broad Street Review)
- Edit-a-thon for high school students: Troy High School students in Fullerton, California moved next door to the Cal State U, Fullerton Pollak library according to the university's student paper, Daily Titan.
- Graphic history: "The mascots, design and visual history of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that puts functionality above aesthetics" is an article on the mostly graphic design–focussed website It's Nice That.
_(cropped)_(cropped).jpg)
- More staying power than CB radio: History Today looks back on "25 Years of Wikipedia", transitioning from an institution that academics once disparaged by comparing it to a public lavatory, to a "grande dame" of the Internet according to no less a grande dame than The New York Times.
- FBI agent hangs probe of US President on Wikipedia article: At least in part, The Federalist says: an agent "tried to force" himself into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that began during the presidency of Barack Obama, and emailed his boss about the Wikipedia article Chain Bridge Bank. According to The Federalist, the agent "sought to support an investigation against President Trump based on information from a Wikipedia page".
- 9/11 429, call 911: A HTTP 429 error for some users accessing wikipedia.org on 11 September triggered a story in Hindustan Times.
- Just in Time: Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Wikimedia Foundation, was named one of 2026 TIME Executives of the Year: Tech and Data (Time)
- Scam targeting Wikipedia page links: Youtuber Eric Parker uploaded a video on a scam impersonating StyleHaul, a former advertising company, known for influencer marketing campaigns. The scammers added a malicious link to the infobox, with the link originally added in May. Parker kindly removed the malicious link, and the revisions containing the link have been deleted. – M
- Notre Dame: has been playing American football since 1887 and avoided playing in a regular football conference. It's had many long series with various teams in order to impress the public and press with the strength of their schedule, or alternatively to rack up wins against weaker teams. The Athletic, part of the New York Times, examines 19 of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football rivalries, for this team which historically played about eight games each season.
- If it's broke, don't fix it: "Wikipedia Fans Worry the Site Is Getting a Bad Deal From Its Streetwear Brand Collab: Two broke kings, linking and building", which regrettably starts out with a rather central misapprehension that Wikipedia "perpetually struggles to pay its server bills", which has not been true in quite some time. (Gizmodo)
.jpg)
- World breathes a sigh of relief: Karmen Petrovic a "star" wrestler was reported dead on Google and briefly in the Wikipedia article about her (AOL). The first false report was added by a temporary acount to the article on September 30 at 00:30 (UTC) and was removed less than an hour later. Four more additions by the same editor lasted a total of about 30 minutes over the next 18 hours.
- Love monument$$$: "Prolific photographers can get cash from Wikipedia for taking pictures of these sites" (KTLA)
Footnotes
- ↑ "65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots" was the headline of the key section in a 2025 Wikimedia Foundation report on the subject, while "overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total".
Discuss this story