ARMS INDUSTRY WIKITHON 2

mouki, Mar 18, 2026

The second arms industry wikithon saw dozens of people come together to edit wikipedia and help develop public knowledge of the global arms industry. While some new-to-editing editors used the time to get to grips with the inner workings of wikipedia, cutting their teeth on non-arms related topics (e.g. alternative reality games artists or Stanford University), others dove deep into the wiki universe, editing looooong articles and creating new pages.

A Few Things We Accomplished

We tidied up the Palantir page, provided additional citations and updated statistics, and wrote up new sections on
- The Met Police’s use of Palantir AI tools to monitor and profile its own officers.
- The inclusion of Palantir on the Met Police and London Mayor’s ‘Precise Policing Phase 2 Dynamic Market’, an initiative intended to expedite the use of new technologies by frontline officers.
- Use of Palantir’s AI tool, Nectar, by Bedfordshire police to read and translate over 100,000 text messages, map relationships and suggest offences.
- NHS England’s failure to comply with a freedom of information request that sought disclosure of its contract with Palantir. The contract was published a second time with fewer redactions following legal action.
On the Watchkeeper X page, we detailed how the Romanian Ministry of National Defense placed an order for three unmanned aerial vehicles worth USD 180 million that were never delivered, but are believed to have been tested in an airfield in the occupied Golan Heights.
We memorialised the divestment of Norway’s largest pension fund, KLP, from General Dynamics on the tech company’s page. KLP divested from General Dynamics in 2021, citing the company’s production of components for delivery platforms exclusively intended for nuclear weapons as the main reason.
We contributed to the Project Maven page, adding information about the technologies being used by the US military in its war on Iran.
Using source material in several languages (Serbian, Bosnian and Italian), we added information to the Genasys page about Serbian law enforcement’s alleged use of its military-grade long-range acoustic devices against anti-corruption protestors in Belgrade in March 2025. Wikipedia’s editorial standards make it somewhat difficult to link LRADs made by a particular company to an event as editors are limited to using secondary sources. Luckily, in this case, journalists have identified Genasys products on law enforcement vehicles present at the scene. Editors cited the use of LRADs on the Greece-Turkey border as an area for future wiki-editing–watch this space!
We began a few translation projects, including:
- Creating a Nitro-Chem page in English (currently available only in Polish and Ukrainian). Polish company Nitro-Chem is Europe’s sole supplier of TNT but roughly half of its output is delivered to the US, where it is said to be used to develop ammunition which is then exported to Israel for use in Gaza.
- Creating a Palantir page in Greek. To add to the growing ‘controversies’ subsection, Palantir contracted with the Greek government in 2020 to support its response to the coronavirus pandemic; the two-page contract contained no provisions for anonymising data and was signed without undergoing an impact assessment to ensure compliance with privacy laws.

The next Wikithon will take place on Wednesday April 29th, in person and online. Register here.