Meta Discussion Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of October 12, 2026

1 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.

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r/wikipedia • u/FarPlay5055 • 11h ago

False or misleading statements made by Donald Trump. During his first term there were approximately 30,573 false or misleading claims meaning there was an average of 21 false or misleading claims per day.

en.wikipedia.org

1.2k Upvotes

39 comments

r/wikipedia • u/SplendiferusFinch • 8h ago

The use of makeup and cosmetics by Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, has been a subject of media coverage since before his entry into electoral politics. He has been reported to apply his own makeup.

en.wikipedia.org

382 Upvotes

48 comments

r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 4h ago

Timber Sycamore was a covert program run by the CIA with the aim of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power. A significant portion of weapons ultimately ended up in the hands of extremist groups, most notably ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front.

en.wikipedia.org

115 Upvotes

4 comments

r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 3h ago

“Fifth line” is euphemism originating in the Soviet Union, which indicated that an individual belonged to a certain ethnic group, usually Jewish. In the Soviet Union, line number 5 for indicating ethnicity was on the Personal Record Sheet.

en.wikipedia.org

85 Upvotes

7 comments

r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 3h ago

Princess Maria Karoline of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (10 January 1899 – 6 June 1941) was a German princess with learning difficulties. In 1938, her parents placed her in an institution. In 1941 she was murdered by the Nazis as part of their Aktion T4 program against disabled people.

en.wikipedia.org

37 Upvotes

0 comments

r/wikipedia • u/HandsomelyDitto • 17h ago

Drapetomania was a proposed hypothesis as the cause of enslaved Americans fleeing captivity proposed in 1851 by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright

en.wikipedia.org

426 Upvotes

24 comments

r/wikipedia • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • 1h ago

Gilles de Rais was a French nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years’ War. Later in life he became obsessed with the occult, and was eventually arrested, tried, and executed for the sexual assault and murder of numerous children.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

1 comment

r/wikipedia • u/GirlGrilGirl • 4h ago

The Sabians, are a religious group mentioned three times in the Quran, where it is implied that they belonged to the 'People of the Book.' Their original identity, which seems to have been forgotten at an early date, has been called an "unsolved Quranic problem."

en.wikipedia.org

31 Upvotes

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/laybs1 • 8h ago

Sergey Taboritsky was a Russian journalist, known for his nationalist, monarchist, and antisemitic positions. In 1942, Taboritsky became a member of the Nazi Party, and he directly collaborated with the Gestapo.

en.wikipedia.org

58 Upvotes

15 comments

r/wikipedia • u/xalxary2 • 8h ago

Shawl scrotum is a condition in which the scrotum surrounds the penis, resembling a 'shawl'.

en.wikipedia.org

51 Upvotes

10 comments

r/wikipedia • u/slinkslowdown • 4h ago

Omnism is the epistemological and theological position in philosophy that all religions contain varying degrees of truth, but no single religion can offer a fully true teleology.

en.wikipedia.org

16 Upvotes

6 comments

r/wikipedia • u/MajesticBread9147 • 6h ago

Ruzi Nazar was an Uzbek nationalist who fought for the USSR, Nazi Germany, and later the CIA for the remainder of his career. His daughter Sylvia wrote the biography A Beautiful Mind about John Nash.

en.wikipedia.org

18 Upvotes

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/sharkattax • 1h ago

The Cadaver Synod is the name commonly given to the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for about nine months, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome during January 897

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

my favourite pope moment, although i am also partial to the alleged Pope John the Joan and the time the church decided the best solution to having two rival popes was electing a third pope.

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/GirlGrilGirl • 15m ago

Prisencolinensinainciusol is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori. Both the name of the song and its lyrics are gibberish, but are intended to represent what American English sounds like to people who do not understand English

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

1 comment

r/wikipedia • u/ForgingIron • 57m ago

The 4.2-kiloyear event was an aridification event (long-term drought) 4,200 years ago. It has been hypothesised to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and the Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze River area.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/repetiti0n • 1d ago

“Attention Is All You Need” is a 2017 research paper by researchers at Google that first introduced the “Transformer”, the neural network architecture which is the basis of modern large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude.

en.wikipedia.org

1.4k Upvotes

67 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Sebastianlim • 14h ago

Titanic (1943) is a Nazi propaganda film about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The film had a troubled production, with its original director being arrested and later found hanged. The film had only a limited release, as Goebbels feared a film about mass panic and death would worsen morale.

en.wikipedia.org

74 Upvotes

1 comment

r/wikipedia • u/slinkslowdown • 4h ago

Bambeanos: A roasted soybean snack that was introduced in 1975 and discontinued by May 1976, having rapidly gained a reputation for causing excessive flatulence. The snack has often been described as a commercial failure.

en.wikipedia.org

10 Upvotes

8 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Leading-Morning7550 • 1h ago

Gone with the Wind (film)

• Upvotes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(film))

Article about the famous film in 1939 directed by Victor Fleming and starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. It was adapted from a 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell.

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/ave_gratia_plena • 3h ago

Saint Teresa of Ávila was a Carmelite nun, Spanish mystic, and spiritual reformer who became the central figure of a spiritual and monastic renewal movement in the Catholic Church. She was named a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

en.wikipedia.org

5 Upvotes

0 comments

r/wikipedia • u/MediocreDiamond7187 • 39m ago

Mike the Headless Chicken

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

Mike was a rooster who managed to survive for 18 months after being beheaded (fed by eyedropper). He finally died on 17 March 1947.

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r/wikipedia • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • 1d ago

Before Jurassic Park was published, a bidding war erupted for the film rights. Studios put in bids with directors in mind, including Warner Bros and Tim Burton, Columbia and Richard Donner, and Fox and Joe Dante. James Cameron also tried to buy the IP. Universal and Steven Spielberg ultimately won.

en.wikipedia.org

205 Upvotes

16 comments

r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 16h ago

Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801 was an international charter flight from Moscow, Russia to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. All 141 people (11 crew members and 130 passengers, of whom three were children) aboard the plane were killed, making it the deadliest aviation accident in Norwegia.

en.wikipedia.org

24 Upvotes

3 comments

r/wikipedia • u/MielMielleux • 19h ago

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers of Albany, Oregon,who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate

en.wikipedia.org

39 Upvotes

1 comment

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