WikiWise | Lake Ontario or Lake America? Wikipedia is not afraid to pick a side
Wikimedia Foundation staff vote to unionize (just in time for Labor Day) and Wikipedia grapples with Trump's EO to rename Lake Ontario.
🔔 Wiki Briefing
Wikimedia workers unite
On September 3, U.S. employees of the Wikimedia Foundation voted overwhelmingly to unionize, ending months of back-and-forth with management. They will be represented by the Communications Workers of America.
The vote follows a contentious summer. In late July, employees asked the Foundation to recognize the union voluntarily. Days later, at the annual Wikimania conference, staff and sympathetic volunteers pressed new-ish CEO Bernadette Meehan about whether it would. Meehan said the Foundation would answer after the conference.
And then it did, and the answer was "no," but employees could seek recognition through the National Labor Relations Board. Union supporters called the timing cowardly and out of step with movement values. The vote wasn't remotely close: 158 to 14, or 92% in favor.
Wired reports the push was less about pay and more about a work environment staff say deteriorated as headcount ballooned during the pandemic. Foundation leadership now says it will engage in "good-faith collective bargaining" with the union.
📰 In the News
Ontario, now and forever
Lake Ontario is now officially Lake America, according to the White House, and also Google Maps, but absolutely nowhere on Wikipedia.
After trade negotiations with Canada collapsed in late August, President Trump signed an executive order renaming the smallest of North America's Great Lakes, a rerun of the January 2025 EO that turned the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America in the federal government's official place-name database and, soon after, the map services of favor-seeking technology firms. Both times, Google quickly updated its maps, citing a policy of showing each country's official names to users in that country. Americans now see "Lake America", Canadians see "Lake Ontario", and the rest of the world sees both.
Lake Ontario image: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But Wikipedia doesn't work like that: Wikipedia pages appear the same worldwide, so editors had to pick just one. Pro-Trump editors swarmed the article, and the edit war got heated enough that administrators locked the page so only they could edit it, a rare move reserved only for the most contentious topics.
The outcome was never in doubt. Wikipedia's "Use commonly recognizable names" policy instructs editors to go with what the majority of reliable sources call a subject, not the decree of any particular government. So long as most of the world (including most Americans) calls it "Lake Ontario," so will Wikipedia. In fact, you can read all about it on Wikipedia at Lake Ontario naming dispute.
The same applies to companies: a rebrand won't change your Wikipedia article's name until independent sources start using it regularly.
📚 Research Report
Wikipedia's gender gap is shrinking (kind of)
Women are roughly half the world's population, according to Wikipedia, but for years only a small share of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women: just 15.53%. That number led to the creation of Women in Red, a volunteer project dedicated to closing the gap, which even has its own page: Gender bias on Wikipedia.
A decade on, new research shows that in some fields, women are now actually more likely to have articles than men. Researchers found female biology professors at major U.S. research universities were 25 percent more likely to have an article than their male colleagues, with similar findings for women in STEM reported in Germany.
Overall, though, women are still just 20.41% of all biographies. Progress, but a long way from parity.
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
Too much jargon in English Wikipedia? Overlong paragraphs getting you down? Simple English Wikipedia reduces and rewrites articles in basic vocabulary and short sentences. It's intended for children and others learning English, it's also fun to see how it handles esoteric topics like quantum tunneling.
💡 Tips & Tricks
Working on a Wikipedia page for fun, but getting stuck? The Teahouse is a help desk run by volunteers who are ready to help newcomers. Their focus is generally not brand representatives, but if you ask nicely—and disclose your conflict of interest—someone might help after all.
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