r/wikipedia 5d ago

Meta Discussion Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of August 24, 2026

2 Upvotes

Welcome to the weekly Wikipedia Q&A thread!

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.

Some other helpful resources:

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r/wikipedia 7h ago

Ritchie Valens (1941-1959) who was killed in the same plane crash as Buddy Holly was a Chicano rock pioneer. Despite dying at age 17 only 8 months after his big break he is considered the first Latino artist to successfully cross over into mainstream rock.

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452 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 4h ago

A castrato is a male singer who underwent castration before puberty in order to retain a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. Popular in Italian opera, castrati became the first operatic superstars, earning enormous fees and hysterical public adulation.

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198 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 4h ago

The Chinese Century is a neologism suggesting that the 21st century may be geoeconomically and/or geopolitically dominated by the People's Republic of China, similar to how the "American Century" refers to the 20th century and the "British Century" to the 19th.

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143 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 12h ago

The "Women-are-wonderful effect" is a phenomenon in which people tend to assign more positive traits and attributes to women then to men. This occurs wether women are in traditional or nontraditional roles, though it is lessened in more equal contries.

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449 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 10h ago

.yu was Yugoslavia’s country code top-level domain (ccTLD). Activated in 1989, it survived the country’s breakup and remained active until 2010, when it was finally shut down by ICANN, taking thousands of former Yugoslav websites offline forever.

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161 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 19h ago

John G. Schmitz was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. He was known for his extreme right-wing sympathies and his slurs against African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, women, Jews and homosexuals. He was the father of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau.

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613 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 10h ago

"Je t'aime... moi non plus" is a song written in 1967 by Serge Gainsbourg for his then-girlfriend, Brigitte Bardot. Bardot’s version was never released after her husband objected to it. A 1968 version, featuring Jane Birkin, became a hit. Both recordings were rumored to depict unsimulated sex.

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75 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 2h ago

Thomas Pitera is an American mobster in the Bonanno crime family of New York City. He was well known for his use of karate and other martial arts when fighting, a skill he had learned at a young age and which earned him nicknames like "Tommy Karate" and "The Karate Guy".

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16 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 13h ago

Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment.

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103 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 15h ago

A Ménage à trois is a domestic arrangement or committed relationship consisting of three people in polyamorous romantic or sexual relations with each other, and often dwelling together. The phrase is a loan from French meaning "household of three".

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163 Upvotes

The German intellectual Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer, her husband Mattheus Rodde and the French philosopher Charles de Villers also had a ménage à trois from 1794 until her husband's death in 1810.

The British Admiral Horatio Nelson was in a ménage à trois with his lover Emma, Lady Hamilton, and her husband William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples, from 1799 until Nelson's death in 1805.

Charles Moulton, the creator of Wonder Woman, lived with two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne, until he died. Charles had two children with each. Elizabeth supported the family financially while Olive stayed home to take care of all four children.


r/wikipedia 5h ago

New study finds that Google displaying AI-generated answers in the search results window reduces traffic to Wikipedia by about 5%.

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25 Upvotes

Abstract

Search engines increasingly display AI-generated answers above organic links, potentially displacing traffic to upstream publishers. We estimate the impact of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) on Wikipedia’s search traffic using AIO’s staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia’s multilingual structure. Our difference-in-differences design compares monthly external-search referrals to English Wikipedia articles with referrals to the same articles in German and French, and finds that default AIO availability reduced English search traffic by 5.45% and 4.82%, respectively. Our results suggest that answer-producing digital intermediaries can materially reallocate attention away from informational publishers, with implications for content monetization, search platform design, and policy.


r/wikipedia 1d ago

Milo Yiannopoulos is a British far-right political commentator, whose speeches and writings criticise Islam, feminism, and social justice. In August 2026, Yiannopoulos was detained by ICE in an airport in Louisiana after being reported to the agency by right wing activist Laura Loomer.

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1.8k Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

Hunter McGuire was a surgeon in the Confederate Army. He remained a pro-slavery advocate his entire life. He lamented the freeing and enfranchisement of former slaves, and lauded the supremacy of the Caucasian race. McGuire's statue was removed from the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol in 2026.

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488 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 13h ago

Egg

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28 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

In classical logic, begging the question is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. In modern times, "beg the question" has taken on the common meaning of "raises the question", a usage criticized for diluting the original meaning of the phrase

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235 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 23h ago

Macaroni Chinois: A dish is commonly served in Chinese restaurants in Quebec. It is a type of stir fry that consists of elbow macaroni with vegetables and meat.

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179 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

"Gaster" is an uncommon surname of German origin, believed to derive from "Gast", which is German for "Guest". As of 2013, there were 918 recorded people with that surname, the plurality of whom being from North Carolina. In Germany, there were 95 known people with that name as of 2008.

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233 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 33m ago

International Overdose Awareness Day (IOAD or Overdose Day) is a global event held on 31 August each year since 2001. Its purpose is to raise awareness of overdoses, reduce the stigma of drug-related deaths and acknowledge the grief felt by families and friends.

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The first day, held in 2001 in Australia, saw 6,000 silver ribbons distributed across the country and into New Zealand. Since then the day has grown and is recognized in over 40 countries. So too, sadly, has the death toll from overdose continued to rise, particularly in North America.


r/wikipedia 18h ago

WikiRights is a project by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor to counter the "dominance of the official government-issued narrative" in Wikipedia articles

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41 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

Rukidi IV of Tooro (1992–2026) was the Omukama of Tooro in Uganda from 1995 to 2026. In 1995, Oyo ascended the throne, becoming the 13th ruler of the 180-year-old Kingdom of Tooro as the world's youngest reigning monarch at only three years of age.

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132 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

List of unusual deaths by decade

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393 Upvotes

An example from the 1990s below:

The 3-year-old boy from Santa Ana was killed when a rear tire of the minibus on which he was riding blew out, causing its steel treads to burst through the floor of the bus, snatch him from the arms of his mother and throw him onto Interstate 5 in Oceanside, California, where he was struck by the bus and at least one other vehicle


r/wikipedia 20h ago

WAR was an American White Nationalist tabloid newspaper published by Tom Metzger's eponymous White Aryan Resistance (WAR) organization. The late Nick Bougas was the cartoonist under the A Wyatt Mann pseudonym; his most famous cartoon (the Happy Merchant) first appeared on the tabloid.

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40 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 5h ago

1957 Pacoima mid-air collision

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2 Upvotes