inspired by this complaint, which prompted English Wikipedia to switch its sandwich photo from boiled eggs to baloney, here is a thread of the photos used in different language versions of the "sandwich" article

Italian Wikipedia uses a pic of an Italian hoagie uploaded by a guy in New York

Wikipedia editors spent seven years and 140,000 words (longer than Homer's Odyssey) fighting over A SINGLE LETTER in the name of this dairy product. Thread! In 2002, an anonymous volunteer created the article "Yogurt." Everything was fine until Christmas 2003 when someone named Derek randomly changed it to "Yughurt," the British Commonwealth spelling. An argument EXPLODED. It was like the Revolutionary War had never ended

Sometimes Wikipedians get SO sick of people making the same edits over and over and over that they'll add angry invisible comments that pop up when you try to make a change. Thread of my favorites!
1. From "Beyoncé" (Texas birth certificates don't allow accented letters) way too many people were changing the official wikipedia dog photo to a pic of their own dog

Not sure if Wikipedia admin drama translates well to a wide audience but last week, some of the most bizarre and perplexing shit went down??? thread first of all, there's an article in the @wikisignpost that probably will give a more concise summary of this than I will en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…

Wikipedia editors got this article up minutes after the picture was released. Here's how at 8:19pm ET Thursday night, a French woman with the username Tataral created the article "Donald Trump mug shot." At this point, the article didn't even contain the photo itself because the copyright is a little sticky

The Wikipedia editor dog is quite possibly my favorite photo on Wikipedia. Here's the story behind it! First of all, he has a name! It's Graf, after Poligraf Poligrafovich, the dog in the Russian novella Heart of a Dog. Graf is literally all over Wikipedia. Here he is on the "Mongrel" article
(photo by his owner, Smallbones)

this is the story of the Barbenheimer article (thread) Three weeks ago, Wikipedia editor Freoh, who frequently edits the "quantum computing" article, created a redirect: anyone who searched Wikipedia for "Barbenheimer" landed at the “Oppenheimer” article. Minutes later, Freoh had a change of heart, sending searches to “Barbie.”

here's a big thread of the "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" articles on random fandom wikis

i have finally done it. i finally read the list of all 276 of Australia's big things from start to finish. thread of some i like

In 2017, someone changed Wikipedia's Vatican flag SVG to look more like the Vatican Coat of Arms, which was an honest mistake. Now, you can tell which flag manufacturers and even emojis used the faulty Wikipedia file lol (thread)
noticed by Redditor horizontalhole! tons of flags have red in the tiara... AKA they appear to have used that faulty file that was on Wikimedia Commons from 2017-2022

ok seems like people liked hearing about the green and black mode... so here are some cool wikipedia tools, scripts, and settings that you probably didn't know about! one of the easiest ways to get Wikipedia dark mode is preferences --> gadgets --> dark mode toggle, which gives you this button to toggle between light and dark

"Index" has been trending on Wikipedia for the past 10 days and nobody knows why! Maybe people are getting REALLY into statistical composite measures, but it's probably just someone's poorly-configured bot Here's the bug report from last week right when this spike happened phabricator.wikimedia.org/T327027

Wikipedia editors CANNOT DECIDE WHAT TO CALL THIS THING. By my unofficial count, the 15-year-long debate is ~65k words — as long as a novel (thread) Here is a small sample of impassioned subsections on the talk page of the "Maize" article. The total debate is about as long as books like The Fault in Our Stars and Brave New World

Thread of bad submissions to wikipedia logo contests! First up: a bunch of encyclopedias mashed together to form a centipede (a "wikipede") wearing groucho glasses (2003) 2001

It's the liminal Christmas/NYE week, arguably the best time to edit Wikipedia. Here are a few ways to get started if you're a new!! Wikipedia is huge (6.6m articles in English alone) but it needs you! An encyclopedia requires *a lot* of maintenance work — updating topics with recent news, cleaning up prose, adding better sources, etc etc. Here's the backlog! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…

Wikipedia has been quick to add updated info about Liz Truss's resignation (including this incredible image/caption). thread of what's been happening behind the scenes!! at ~12:29 GMT, there were the first reports that Truss would be stepping down after just 45 days, making her the shortest-serving PM in UK history. You can see edit conflicts across all of wikipedia spike!!!

Hello! @LucasWerkmeistr and I crunched the numbers and found the Wikipedia articles with the longest controversy sections by word count. Thread ahead, buckle up!!! being friends with @LucasWerkmeistr is crazy bc you message him something like“hey what would be the best way to get all Sikipedia articles with a ‘controversies’ section?” and then he responds “like this?” with the exact code you want

thanks to some sql help from intrepid data scientist @LucasWerkmeistr, i have compiled a list of the 206 articles in english wikipedia with the suffix -ussy. here's a threadussy of a few of them apologies in advance. also, the full list is here gist.github.com/lucaswerkmeist…

learning what different languages call the @ symbol just made my day!!! thread of my favorites! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#N… I'm getting these from this Wikipedia article btw! I don't speak all these languages en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#N…

lots of memes about speedy wikipedia editors — quick thread about what went down on wikipedia in the minutes after her death was announced at 17:31 UTC, the first reputable sources reported queen's death. and BAM, just like that, edit conflicts ensued grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000213/ed…

happy 118 year anniversary of the cursed Olympic marathon with with "purposeful dehydration", rat poison, rotten apples, wild dogs, etc. in case you haven't read it in a while, here's a thread of highlights Winner Fred Lorz cross the finish line first and took a photo with Alice Roosevelt before people realized he'd hitchhiked from mile 9 until the car BROKE DOWN at mile 18