🗞️ 5 things the world just decided to document

A luxury cruise ship. A fireworks factory. 275 million stolen student records. A volcano hikers weren't supposed to be on. And a 19th-century queer epic nobody had written about in English — until this week.

Every 7 days, Wikipedia gets a new batch of articles. These are the ones that made it.

A Dutch couple boarded MV Hondius in Ushuaia on April 1. Three weeks later, the husband was dead — the first known case of Andes virus spreading between people on a cruise ship. His widow died two weeks after, on a flight to Johannesburg. By May 10, the ship docked in Tenerife over the regional president's objections. 8 confirmed cases. 3 dead. WHO Level 3.

Meanwhile, in Liuyang, Hunan — China's fireworks capital — a factory exploded on May 4. The company had been fined ¥15,000 in January for mixing chemicals incorrectly. Thirty-seven people died. The event got Wikipedia articles in 12 languages within days.

On May 7, every Canvas LMS user logged in to find a ransom note. ShinyHunters had taken 3.65 TB of data — 275 million records, 8,809 universities, 20+ countries. It happened during finals week. Instructure paid an undisclosed ransom on May 11.

That same week, Mount Dukono in Indonesia had been closed to hikers since April 17. Some came anyway — to hike, and for some, to shoot content. On May 8 at 7:14 AM, the mountain erupted. Ash column: 10 km. Out of 20 hikers on the slope, 3 didn't make it down.

By the 1700s, roughly one in three British sailors had a tattoo. They used gunpowder-and-needle technique and marked their bodies with anchors, mermaids, crucifixes — proof they had been to sea. A sailor wrote in 1862: "They are regular Picture Books." Wikipedia just awarded its article on sailor tattoos Good Article status.

And if you've never heard of Phoenixes Flying Together: it's a 19th-century Chinese narrative poem, 1.8 million words, written by Cheng Huiying. It follows two men whose desires aren't quite what society expects — and two women who married each other and kept loving each other. Scholars call it "the only known complete novel about male homosexuality written by a woman in ancient China." It existed for over 120 years without an English Wikipedia article. Now it has one.

What's the most surprising thing that got its Wikipedia article this week — the virus, the hack, or the queer epic?

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