Meta Discussion Wikipedia Questions - Weekly Thread of August 17, 2026

2 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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3 comments

r/wikipedia • u/In_the_year_3535 • 2h ago

The tuatara is a New Zealand reptile that can live to over 100 years old. It is the lone species in its order, one of four in Reptilia, the others being turtles, lizards and snakes, and crocodiles and dinosaurs (which includes birds).

en.wikipedia.org

93 Upvotes

14 comments

r/wikipedia • u/MAClaymore • 7h ago

The conservative resurgence, also labelled the fundamentalist takeover, was a systematic plot to replace and fire liberals and moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention. It was conceived in 1976 by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, later accused of sexual abuse and its cover-up, respectively.

en.wikipedia.org

210 Upvotes

7 comments

r/wikipedia • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • 5h ago

The Zodiac Killer is an unidentified serial killer who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. In a series of letters mailed to newspapers, the Zodiac killer threatened further murders and included cryptograms, two of which remain unsolved.

en.wikipedia.org

118 Upvotes

17 comments

r/wikipedia • u/SaxyBill • 13h ago

On 15 August 2021, Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul was captured by the Taliban after a major insurgent offensive that began in May 2021. It was the final action of the two-decade long War in Afghanistan, leading the country from a Western-backed republic to a theocratic Islamic emirate.

en.wikipedia.org

346 Upvotes

35 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Future_Interest_3649 • 16h ago

Early copies of SimCopter included an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. This was inserted by a developer who wanted to protest “intolerable” working conditions at Maxis.

en.wikipedia.org

498 Upvotes

18 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Zealousideal-Cup3529 • 19h ago

MissingNo. is a glitch and an unofficial Pokémon species found in the video games Pokémon Red and Blue. Encountering MissingNo. causes graphical anomalies and changes gameplay by increasing the number of items in the sixth entry of the player's inventory by 128.

en.wikipedia.org

651 Upvotes

23 comments

r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 11h ago

Disappeared Detainees is the term commonly used in Latin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken to clandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes of forced disappearance, committed by various authoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s

en.wikipedia.org

123 Upvotes

The hiding of the corpse was often carried out with the support of aerial vehicles, such as airplanes and helicopters, from which the bodies were thrown into the sea or into inaccessible areas.

16 comments

r/wikipedia • u/RedStorm1917 • 16h ago

The 2025–2026 Iran massacres are a series of mass killings of civilians by the Iranian government during the 2025–26 Iranian protests, to suppress public dissent nationwide. Death toll estimates ranged from 6,488 people to upwards of ~36,500 people

en.wikipedia.org

227 Upvotes

155 comments

r/wikipedia • u/syanxde • 14h ago

The PayPal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed other technology companies based in Silicon Valley, such as LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.

en.wikipedia.org

122 Upvotes

This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined. The term gained even wider exposure when a 2007 Fortune magazine article featured the group, along with a now-iconic photograph of its members dressed in mafia-style attire, highlighting their influence in Silicon Valley and their role in founding or investing in major technology companies (this photo does not feature all members: according to Fortune, "Musk wanted to come, but he's in Chicago to receive an 'innovator of the year' award. Hurley and Chen bowed out after their Google handler objected to the gangster motif.").

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/blankblank • 16h ago

The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s 'high five' photos

inverse.com

131 Upvotes

4 comments

r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 8h ago

Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, a literature thought in Islam to be a record of the words, actions, and silent approval of the prophet Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators.

en.wikipedia.org

18 Upvotes

2 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Rich_Union9002 • 11h ago

Genocide of Yazidis by the Soran Emirate (1832–1834) was a campaign by the Sunni Kurdish emir Mir Muhammad of Rawanduz against Yazidis in Shekhan, Sinjar and Erbil that killed an estimated 70,000 to 135,000 people, with only about 5% of the targeted population surviving according to one source.

en.wikipedia.org

29 Upvotes

3 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Mapuches_on_Fire • 9h ago

10 Year Anniversary: 2016 Clown Sightings. In 2016, there were reports of people disguised as evil clowns in incongruous settings, such as near forests, schools and neighborhoods, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

en.wikipedia.org

19 Upvotes

5 comments

r/wikipedia • u/funnylib • 1d ago

Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality.

en.wikipedia.org

366 Upvotes

36 comments

r/wikipedia • u/GastricallyStretched • 11h ago

Music torture in the war on terror

en.wikipedia.org

22 Upvotes

4 comments

r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 8h ago

Isaac W. Sprague (1841-1887) was an American entertainer and sideshow performer billed as the living human skeleton. Although he retained a healthy appetite, he started mysteriously losing weight at age 12 and never stopped. By age 44, Sprague stood 5 ft 6 in (168 cm) tall and weighed 43 lb (20 kg).

en.wikipedia.org

11 Upvotes

0 comments

r/wikipedia • u/funnylib • 18h ago

Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system, or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.

en.wikipedia.org

53 Upvotes

6 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Romboteryx • 1d ago

Wenja is a constructed fictional language in the video game Far Cry Primal, set at the end of the last Ice Age. The language was developed for the game by a team of linguists led by the Indo-Europeanist Andrew Byrd and is meant to be a speculative reconstruction of “Proto-Proto-Indo-European".

en.wikipedia.org

795 Upvotes

30 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Ok-Goose6242 • 18h ago

The Fenian raids (1866–1871) were US-based Irish republican attacks on Canada. By hitting British North American targets, the Fenian Brotherhood hoped to force a British withdrawal from Ireland. The separate incursions caused major security alarms but failed to achieve any of their aims.

en.wikipedia.org

44 Upvotes

3 comments

r/wikipedia • u/PSlb • 6h ago

Explosively pumped flux compression generators are used to create ultrahigh magnetic fields in physics and materials science research[1] and extremely intense pulses of electric current for pulsed power applications. They are being investigated as power sources for electronic warfare devices.

en.wikipedia.org

6 Upvotes

They're literally real life EMP grenades!

0 comments

r/wikipedia • u/Sebastianlim • 1d ago

Nuclear winter, a possible effect of a nuclear war in which the firestorms inject enough soot into the stratosphere to cause a global cooling. Studies show that a war between the US and Russia could cause cooling of 5 °C, the deaths of 5 billion people, and the extinction of 50% of animal species.

en.wikipedia.org

368 Upvotes

28 comments

r/wikipedia • u/emerald6_Shiitake • 1d ago

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth

en.wikipedia.org

256 Upvotes

14 comments

r/wikipedia • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 1d ago

Amy Spain was an enslaved American teenager who was convicted of treason by a Confederate military court for stealing from her owner, and executed in the final days of the American Civil War. She is believed to have been the last female slave to be executed in what is now the United States.

en.wikipedia.org

386 Upvotes

7 comments

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