This month, San Francisco-based Wikipedia turns 25 — young for a human, geriatric for a not-for-profit digital encyclopedia. In that time, it has grown from an experiment in crowdsourcing knowledge to one of the world’s most visited websites, a repository of society’s collective wisdom and a thunderdome for its warring tribes. More than 27 billion people visit Wikipedia each month, it says, and they don’t always behave while they’re there.
Just take a look at the history of the San Francisco entry, which received more than 1.6 million pageviews last month. Every Wikipedia page has a back-end “talk” page, where volunteer editors and contributors debate what merits inclusion, what the wording should be, how well sourced a fact is, and which images should appear. Unsurprisingly, the San Francisco page has been the site of countless factual standoffs, grammatical tizzies, and “lame edit wars (opens in new tab)” (which are so widespread, they have earned a page on Wikipedia).
Emeline Brule knows all about these squabbles. A longtime Wikipedia editor and volunteer with the Bay Area Wikipedians User Group, a community for editors, she gave us the lowdown on the most interesting debates that have roiled the talk page of Wikipedia’s San Francisco entry. “Our goal is to make sure that everyone has information that they need to understand what’s at stake,” she said — even when the stakes are as low as deciding whether Frisco or San Fran is the worse nickname.
The Golden Gate Bridge photo debate
The San Francisco Wikipedia page and the San Francisco Bay Area Wikipedia page both prominently feature the Golden Gate Bridge, alongside other landmarks. But landing on that image was not straightforward.
“There has been a 19-year discussion about which image we should have in the info box at the top,” said Brule. “Back in the day, you could only have one. The question was what would be the most distinctive.”
For years, the bridge was the focus of the main photo. Then came pushback in 2007. Some argued that the bridge photo focused on the water, not the city. Others argued that Chinatown should be the featured image, given that San Francisco’s is the largest in the U.S., and the picture would communicate the diversity of residents. “There’s been many, many discussions about whether that should really be the picture,” said Brule.
In 2024, the featured image was changed to a montage. Editors convened and agreed on the new layout, which moved the bridge photo below shots of the city skyline, Alcatraz, Mission Dolores, Chinatown, and a drone image of Golden Gate Park. “I really like the current info box, because it’s got the views, it’s got Chinatown, it’s got everything,” said Brule. “It took us 18 years to get to an agreement.”
A gay mecca?
Everyone knows San Francisco as the nation’s gay capital, with the highest LGBTQ+ population (opens in new tab). It has an airport terminal named for Harvey Milk. It has the Castro.
But is it a “gay mecca”? That’s debatable, said Brule. Editors, she said, have been conflicted on whether “we can use the ‘gay mecca’ title.” Some have added “gay mecca” to the San Francisco page’s introduction, only to have it removed by others.
“Minutes after I edited the mention at the end of the lead of SF’s role as a mecca/refuge for LGTers, someone removed it,” wrote one anonymous editor (opens in new tab) in 2007. “It definitely deserves to be there. … It’s an undeniable fact of life in the City.”
One reason for the mecca-lessness is Wikipedia’s processes, which require editors to cite trusted sources, versus going off of vibes. “We always ground our work in sources and how newspapers and academic articles describe it,” Brule said.
Today, the phrase “gay mecca” does not appear, but the page does have a full LGBTQ+ subsection and a reference to the gay rights movement in the introduction.
Frisco or San Fran or The City?
Few things expose an outsider faster than calling San Francisco “San Fran.” Frisco is debatable: “There’s a lot of discussion about Frisco,” Brule said.
While our Wikipedia entry mentions city nicknames in the etymology section, some users believe they deserve a spot in the introduction as well. A 2020 thread reopened the conversation.
“Leaving the lede as it currently is is a disservice to the reader,” wrote user Eccekevin. “I would amend the lede to ‘San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco and colloquially known as SF or The City … also known as San Fran or Frisco outside of San Francisco’ or something similar to be closer to the truth.”
Disagreement followed: “Unless there’s some source that states that people in San Francisco refer to themselves as ‘the city’ more prominently than everywhere else, I vote for its exclusion,” wrote NKON21.
Examining popular and documented usage, editors ultimately determined that Frisco was not common enough to warrant inclusion in the introduction. Of course, if the pro-Frisco movement wants to change this, it can try. “The word is always being revisited,” Brule said.
Lurie’s page
A newer headache for Bay Area Wikipedia editors is Mayor Daniel Lurie’s page, which is linked from the main San Francisco entry. In June 2025, The Standard reported that an anonymous editor had scrubbed it of details like the mayor’s Jewish heritage, his nonprofit’s failed homeless plan, his support from Republicans, and his mother’s $1 million donation to his campaign.
To eagle-eyed observers, these changes seemed like attempts to delete potential controversies. “Things get reverted when we see them,” said Brule, “but sometimes it’s like a detective job. We can’t quite be everywhere.”
After The Standard called out the changes to Lurie’s page, “these edits were reverted fairly fast,” she said. “For some political pages … a lot of us have them on our watch list, so that when a change comes through, we can look and see whether it was disingenuous.” Sourcing matters, she emphasized. “We only use mainstream news outlets [and don’t] refer to campaign documents or whatnot.”
Tech city
San Francisco is synonymous with tech, but it took a while for the page to reflect that. Local information obsessives Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia in 2001 after their first attempt at a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia, Nupedia, failed during the dot-com era. Born as the bubble was bursting, Wikipedia grew out of an ethos taking hold in San Francisco tech circles at the time — that the web should be open, accessible, and participatory. Still, it wasn’t until 2015 that a “technology” subsection was added to the San Francisco page. The edit mentioned that “San Francisco is now widely considered the most important city in the world for new technology startups.”