Hail to the new chief (executive)
The Wikimedia Foundation gets a new leader just as it gets ready to celebrate Wikipedia's 25th birthday. Meanwhile, AI legal battles are poised to change how Wikipedia works.
📰 In the News
WMF gets new head, finds coffers full
The Wikimedia Foundation has been looking for CEO Maryana Iskander’s replacement since May and it has finally chosen her successor: Bernadette Meehan. The Wall Streeter turned ambassador turned Wikimedian will be tasked with shepherding the Foundation through some of the toughest challenges it has faced, from AI to American conservative rhetoric to international legal battles.
Like past WMF heads, Meehan does not come from the Wikimedia community. She got her start on Wall Street, then moved to the U.S. State Department, with a break during the first Trump administration to be a vice president in the Obama Foundation. Then during the Biden administration, she became the American ambassador to Chile.
Meehan won’t be stepping into a mess, despite the current struggles. As she dives into a slice of leftover birthday cake from Wikipedia’s 25th birthday celebrations, she’ll be able to read over its most recent audit report that shows a net surplus of around $17.6 million. That’s nearly triple that of 2024!
🔔 Wiki Briefing
Wikipedia wins in French court, but could face copyright threats
The Wikimedia Foundation celebrated victory this month in a lawsuit filed by an unnamed French “darling of the far right” earlier this month. Elsewhere in the courtroom, though, Wikipedia might be under a little duress.
The litigious Francophone tried to force the WMF to closely document everyone who edited Wikipedia, gather identifying information about them, and give the plaintiff total control over the article about them—plus financial compensation for other miscellaneous grievances. Not only did the person not get their payday, but when French courts ruled in favor of the Foundation, they were ordered to pay some of the Foundation’s court fees.
The Foundation’s well of wins could run dry though. That is, if you believe what Emory University law professor Matthew Sag says. Sag is reading the writing on the wall after the Authors Guild secured their own win, spelling out a new problem brewing for the online encyclopedia. A New York judge declined to dismiss the Guild’s case against OpenAI that claims LLM designers infringed on copyright, and has the potential to replicate authors’ works.
The judge considered that even AI summaries might be similar enough to an original work to be infringing. What is even more extensive than an AI summary of A Song of Ice and Fire? Almost assuredly the 10,000 word Wikipedia article about it. That could be a huge problem for Wikipedia, Sag argues. Wikipedia is usually protected by the fair use doctrine, but the OpenAI battle might catch it in the crossfire.
📚 Research Report
Groki see, Groki do
News reports already covered the way Grokipedia pulled directly from Wikipedia, but researchers in Dublin have added data to the claim. Here’s what they found:
Grokipedia articles are, on average, about 5,000 words longer than their Wikipedia counterparts. Those extra words usually aren’t adding anything substantive
More of Grokipedia’s content is unsourced or based on a single source
The sourcing used tends to be the kinds of sources Wikipedia doesn’t allow, like social media and blog posts
The author of the paper, Taha Yasseri, argues that these findings show Grokipedia is an “AI-generated echo” of Wikipedia instead of being something that can stand on its own.
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
Readers spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia in 2025, about 2.4 billion hours on English Wikipedia alone. More than 250,000 people contributed globally, publishing an edit five times every second. The most popular article this year? Charlie Kirk, which generated nearly 45 million views.
💡 Tips & Tricks
Test your knowledge of Wikipedia with a Wikipedia Guessing Game based on categories. All articles on Wikipedia have tags at the bottom to denote a topic and help you find all articles tagged with that category. This fun game will give you all the categories and you have to guess the article it matches with.
