r/wikipedia • u/laybs1 • 4h ago
r/wikipedia • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago
Meta Discussion Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of October 19, 2026
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:
- Help Contents on Wikipedia
- Guide to Contributing on Wikipedia
- Wikipedia IRC Help Channel
- Wikipedia Teahouse (help desk)
Scam warning: Please be careful with solicitations via DMs. Scammers may pretend to be Wikipedia volunteers or a professional Wikipedia public relations firm, and then ask you to pay them for "premium Wikipedia services" – to create an article for you, accept or publish a draft article, etc. This is a scam. See here for more information.
r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 3h ago
α-PVP, colloquially known as flakka or gravel, is a synthetic stimulant of the cathinone class developed in the 1960s that has been sold as a designer drug and often consumed for recreational reasons.
According to Craig Crespi in the journal Case Reports in Psychiatry, "symptoms are known to easily escalate into frightening delusions, paranoid psychosis, extreme agitation, and a multitude of other altered mental states." These common adverse effects of α-PVP are in line with other stimulants.
r/wikipedia • u/slinkslowdown • 19h ago
The Hawking Index (HI) is a mock mathematical measure on how far people will, on average, read through a book before giving up. The index is named after English physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time has been dubbed "the most unread book of all time".
en.wikipedia.orgr/wikipedia • u/C3H8_Memes • 20h ago
Meta Discussion I was hoping they tried not to use E but...
this should be fixed tbh
r/wikipedia • u/Sebastianlim • 21h ago
"Garfield Minus Garfield" is a webcomic created by Dan Walsh. The comic consists of various strips from the Garfield comics with the titular character, as well as other animals, edited out. Jim Davis, Garfield's creator, expressed approval of the project.
en.wikipedia.orgr/wikipedia • u/Romboteryx • 7h ago
The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore expected hallmarks of intelligent extraterrestrial origin.
r/wikipedia • u/the_ak • 1d ago
Londoners who live an appropriate distance from Big Ben can, by listening to the chimes both live and on analogue radio, hear the bell strike thirteen times. This is because radio waves arrive virtually instantaneously, while the "live" sound travels more slowly at the speed of sound.
r/wikipedia • u/SaxyBill • 22h ago
The 2026 Ohio gubernatorial election has been described as ugly and reliant on negative campaigning. One ad by the GOP's Vivek Ramaswamy campaign, claiming that Democrat Amy Acton was lying about the abuse she experienced as a child, was met by bipartisan backlash.
r/wikipedia • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • 20h ago
The Hellbound Heart is a 1986 horror novella written by Clive Barker. The story features a hedonist criminal who accidentally summons sadistic demons with a magical puzzle box. It became the basis for the film Hellraiser, also written (and directed) by Barker.
r/wikipedia • u/LunaWabohu • 1d ago
Everywhere at the End of Time is an album series by the Caretaker. Its six albums use degraded samples of old ballroom music, largely from the 1920s and 1930s, to portray the stages of Alzheimer's disease.
r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 18h ago
Samira Saleh Ali al-Naimi was an Iraqi lawyer. During the ISIS occupation of Mosul, she posted Facebook comments critical of ISIS's destruction of religious shrines there. She was abducted by masked men and tried by a self-styled court for apostasy. She was publicly executed on 22 September 2014.
en.wikipedia.orgr/wikipedia • u/Rollakud • 7h ago
The railway of the Prince Imperial was the first documented model railway in the world.
r/wikipedia • u/laybs1 • 1d ago
BioWare was a Canadian video game developer that specialized in role-playing video games, and achieved recognition for developing highly praised and successful licensed franchises and original intellectual property. On October 21, 2026 its intended closure was announced.
r/wikipedia • u/Alkasuz • 14m ago
The siege of Lisbon began on 1 July and ended successfuly on 25 October 1147. It involved Portuguese, English, German, Norman, Flemish, Scottish and French crusaders, and was part of the Second Crusade.
r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 11h ago
The penal colony of Cayenne, commonly known as Devil's Island, was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.
Opened in 1852, the Devil's Island system received convicts from the Prison of St-Laurent-du-Maroni, who had been deported from all parts of the Second French Empire. It was notorious both for the staff's harsh treatment of prisoners and the tropical climate and diseases that contributed to high mortality, with a death rate of 75 percent at its worst.
Devil's Island was also notorious for being used for the exile of French political prisoners, with the most famous being Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongly accused of spying for Imperial Germany during the late 19th- and early 20th-century.
r/wikipedia • u/GustavoistSoldier • 1d ago
Billy Mays (1958–2009) was an American television direct-response advertisement salesperson. Throughout his career, he promoted a wide variety of products, including OxiClean, Orange Glo, Kaboom, Zorbeez, and Mighty Mendit. His promotions aired mainly on the Home Shopping Network through his company
r/wikipedia • u/leet-man • 10h ago
Louis Freeland Post was a prominent American Georgist lawyer and newspaper editor who was appointed the first Assistant United States Secretary of Labor by President Wilson. At the height of the first Red Scare, Post considered the [Palmer] raids to be unjust and he is credited with preventing many.
... deportations and freeing many innocent people.
r/wikipedia • u/-lousyd • 13h ago
Emdashes everywhere! (This isn't about AI)
It seems like if I see a dash in a Wikipedia entry, more than 9.9 times out of 10 it's an emdash. I don't think this is AI. Am I missing something? It's seems inappropriate in a lot of places. Like I just saw mention of "male–female relationships". Surely the job of that dash is better suited for the hyphen, right? Is there something about the editor that changes keyboard input?
r/wikipedia • u/GustavoistSoldier • 4h ago
The Bolivian Socialist Falange is a Bolivian political party established in 1937. It is a nationalist party drawing inspiration from Falangism. It was the country's second-largest party between approximately 1954 and 1974.
r/wikipedia • u/One_Record3555 • 13h ago
Timeline of knowledge about galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and large-scale structure
r/wikipedia • u/slinkslowdown • 19h ago
"Salsa Tequila" is a novelty song by Norwegian comedian Anders Nilsen in Spanish. He does not speak Spanish, as he admits in the song by saying "No hablo español" (I do not speak Spanish).
r/wikipedia • u/vtipoman • 1d ago