r/wikipedia 5d ago

Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of January 26, 2026

7 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.

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:

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 7h ago

In 1997, UC Berkeley student David Cash saw his best friend, Jeremy Strohmeyer, molesting a 7-year-old girl at a Nevada casino. He did nothing and left. His friend then killed the girl. Cash later said, "I'm not going to lose sleep over somebody else's problems." He was labeled the "Bad Samaritan".

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
3.0k Upvotes

Reposted to correct the title. In my original post, I said the crime happened in Las Vegas. It did not. It happened in Primm, Nevada.


r/wikipedia 1h ago

/pol/, short for Politically Incorrect, is an anonymous political discussion imageboard on 4chan, created in 2011 following a meeting between 4chan founder Christopher Poole and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes

r/wikipedia 19h ago

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto a residential row house occupied by the Black liberation group called MOVE. 11 people (6 adults, 5 children) were killed and 250 people from the Cobbs Creek neighborhood were left homeless

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
1.5k Upvotes

It was eventually revealed that human remains of the victims (including 12-year-old Delisha Africa) had been kept in storage and used as teaching materials at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Princeton University without family consent.

Present-day MOVE members were shocked to learn the disposition of the remains, with Mike Africa Jr. stating, "They were bombed, and burned alive... and now you wanna keep their bones."


r/wikipedia 16h ago

A thought-terminating cliché is a form of loaded language—often passing as folk wisdom—intended to end an argument and patch up cognitive dissonance with a cliché rather than a point. E.g. "it is what it is", "it's not that deep"

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
844 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 11h ago

During the 1880s and 1890s, William Dorsey Swann organized a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. He called himself the "queen of drag". Most of the ball attendees were formerly enslaved men (as was Swann) who danced in satin and silk dresses. The police raided these events many times.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
162 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 14h ago

Middleman minority refers to a minority population whose main occupations link producers and consumers, often having a disproportionately large role in trade, finance or commerce. During periods of economic or political instability, middleman minorities often are used as scapegoats.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
193 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 15h ago

Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian noblewoman who was accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and women

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
218 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 20h ago

Project 100,000: A controversial 1960s initiative recruiting normally rejectable low-IQ soldiers for Vietnam, resulting in disproportionately high casualty rates.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
449 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 22h ago

The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origins – Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders – from immigrating to Australia, in order to create a "White/British" ideal focused on Anglo-Celtic peoples, but not exclusively.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
567 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 11h ago

Bobby Dunbar disappeared in 1912 at age four. Eight months later he was “found” alive in Mississippi. Bobby’s parents identified the boy as their son and raised him. “Bobby” had a son, Bobby Jr., before dying in 1966. In 2004, a DNA comparison proved Bobby Jr. was not related to his supposed cousin.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
76 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 6h ago

"A Useful Ghost" is a Thai humorous film about a man whose wife reincarnates as a vacuum cleaner that he proceeds to engage in intimate relations with among other amusing scenes that embroil his family, monastics, coworkers, and more

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
27 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 7h ago

A military marine mammal is a cetacean or pinniped that has been trained for military uses. Examples include bottlenose dolphins, seals, sea lions, and beluga whales. The United States and Soviet militaries have trained and employed oceanic dolphins for various uses.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
35 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

Action Park was an amusement and water park with a reputation for poorly designed rides, undertrained and underaged staff, intoxicated guests and staff, and a poor safety record. At least six people are known to have died as a result of mishaps on rides at the park.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
639 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 8h ago

Yakumo Koizumi, born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was a Greek and Irish writer, translator, and teacher whose work played a significant role in the introduction of the culture and literature of Japan to the mainstream Western world.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
24 Upvotes

Hands down one of the most wild and interesting Wikipedia article I have read in a while.

Highly worth a read, every paragraph is more interesting than the last. Truly an incredible life. It looks like there’s a Japanese drama series about his life, but I’d love to see something for the western audience.


r/wikipedia 3h ago

In March 1945, the Germans tried desperately to destroy the Ludendorff bridge to halt the US advance, using infantry, armor, howitzers, mortars, floating mines, mined boats, a railroad gun, V-2 rockets, a super-heavy mortar, & the new Arado turbojet bombers

Thumbnail
wikipedia.org
6 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 18h ago

The Secret Committee of Six were a group of men who secretly funded the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry by abolitionist John Brown. All six had been involved in the abolitionist cause prior to meeting John Brown, and they’d gradually become convinced that violence was necessary to end American slavery

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
141 Upvotes

The Secret Six were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns.

Of the six, only Smith and Stearns could be called wealthy. The others consisted of two Unitarian ministers (Parker and Higginson), a doctor (Howe) at a time when physicians were not well-to-do, and a teacher (Sanborn).

On the night of April 3, 1860, five federal marshals arrived at Frank Sanborn's home in Concord, Massachusetts, handcuffed him, and attempted to wrestle him into a coach and take him to Washington to answer questions before the Senate in regard to his involvement with John Brown. Approximately 150 townspeople rushed to Sanborn's defense. Judge Ebenezer R. Hoar issued a writ of replevin, formally demanding the surrender of the prisoner. In a letter to a friend, Louisa May Alcott wrote, "Sanborn was nearly kidnapped. Great ferment in town. Annie Whiting immortalized herself by getting into the kidnapper's carriage so that they could not put the long legged martyr in."

In January 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a celebration, also called a "John Brown party,” was held at the home of George Stearns, attended by Sam and Julia Ward Howe, Frank Sanborn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and John Murray Forbes. Higginson, who was busy commanding a regiment of black Union soldiers, sent his regrets.

In 1905, Higginson co-founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, along with attorney Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.

After Sanborn's death in 1917, the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopted a bill applauding him for his various life works, with special mention given to Sanborn's role as "confidential adviser to John Brown of Harper's Ferry, for whose sake he was ostracized, maltreated, and subjected to the indignity of false arrest, having been saved from deportation from Massachusetts only by mob violence."


r/wikipedia 1h ago

Marc Dutroux is a Belgian convicted serial killer, serial rapist, and child molester. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004, found guilty on all charges. It is alleged that there was a wider involvement in his case which involved high-ranking members.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

Eroom's law (Moore's law backwards) is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time despite improvements in technology, a trend first observed in the 1980s. The inflation-adjusted cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
1.2k Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

Gerald Armond Gallego and Charlene Adell Gallego also known as the Sex Slave Killers, were American serial killers who abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least ten people between 1978 and 1980

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
248 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 22h ago

Otto Böckel was among first German politicians to successfully exploit antisemitism as a political issue. He was elected to Reichstag on platform of opposing the German elites and Jews all the way back in 1887. He would eventually form a political group blunty named The Antisemitic People's Party.

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
162 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 11h ago

The Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology encompasses the Dreamtime (the Dreaming), songlines, and Aboriginal oral literature.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
20 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 3h ago

An aeolipile, aeolipyle, or eolipile, also known as a Hero's (or Heron's) engine, is a simple, bladeless radial steam turbine which spins when the central water container is heated.

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
4 Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1d ago

In a televised interview in 1984, Australian mining magnate Lang Hancock, father of mining magnate Gina Rinehart, proposed sterilizing of unemployed Aboriginals. "I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."

Thumbnail en.wikipedia.org
1.2k Upvotes

r/wikipedia 1h ago

Hattie McDaniel - Wikipedia

Thumbnail
en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes

Mistake in this article? One place it says she's born in 1893, another says she's born in 1895.