I edited Pope Leo XIV's Wikipedia article to say he was a Cubs fan.

But I'm not the one who started the rumor. I swear, I did nothing wrong.

As of the moment I’m writing this sentence—nearing 10 pm, local time, on Sunday, May 11, 2025—the Wikipedia article Pope Leo XIV has had over 2500 edits in the last 4 days. It has been a thrilling ride for those volunteer Wikipedia editors who have swarmed the article, attempting to mold it into an accurate encyclopedia entry of the 267th leader of the Catholic church.

While I don’t have much of a history making edits to pages related to popes¹, I found myself compelled to weigh in on both the Pope Leo XIV article and the 2025 papal conclave article for the same reason I usually edit: I looked at the articles and saw issues.

In the case of 2025 papal conclave, I mostly worked to correct tenses. I updated various sections of the article from future and present tense to past tense. It’s a natural thing to do when an event went from being in the future to the present to the past. (I often enjoy making these kinds of tense-based edits, although most of my experience in this area has been related to movies or television shows.)

Meanwhile, my edits to the Pope Leo XIV page were minor. I mostly cleaned up sloppiness. The kind of sloppiness that results from a sudden wave of editors all rushing in to edit at the same time.

Until 19:13 UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) on May 8—a few hours after Pope Leo XIV was revealed to the world—when I made the following addition to the article:

He is reportedly a [[Chicago Cubs]] fan.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Curtis |first1=Charles |title=Is Pope Leo a Chicago Cubs or White Sox fan? Here's the reported answer. |url=https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2025/05/08/pope-leo-chicago-cubs-fan-white-sox-robert-prevost/83516795007/ |website=USA Today}}</ref>

Or, simply:

He is reportedly a Chicago Cubs fan.

What I did not know, in the moment, was that I was perpetuating a mistruth that had taken the internet by storm. I watched as the page evolved. First, my sentence was moved from the place where I had added it (a new single-sentence paragraph in “Early life and education”) up into the preceding paragraph. It then jumped down to a new section called “Personal life,” which makes sense.

Then, at 20:56 UTC—less than two hours since I made my edit—a new editor stepped in to update the sentence to:

According to his brother John, he is a fan of the Chicago White Sox of Major League Baseball, though other sources have indicated he supports the Chicago Cubs.

Two minutes later, the same editor updated it to:

According to his brother John, he is a fan of the Chicago White Sox of Major League Baseball.

The editor left a note with their edit, reading:

Source indicating Cubs fandom is very weak, remove

Ouch. Is this fair? Was my source very weak? Why did I make this edit to begin with, you might ask?

I thought it was a good edit at the time.

Let’s be clear: I’m not a Cubs fan. I’m a Twins fan, and not a very good one. I go to a few games a year, rarely watch them on television, and don’t follow professional baseball very closely. But everyone I was talking to and everything I was reading that afternoon seemed unified around one question: Is the new pope Cubs fan or a White Sox fan?

Sure, there were some other questions, like who saw this coming? and is he really from Chicago? and what kind of pope will he be? and does he like deep dish? But at some point, the narrative that seemed most pervasive and important to me—and that I thought was missing from his Wikipedia article—was the allegation being reported that the new pope was a Cubs fan.

Every time I googled it I saw the same thing: he’s a Cubs fan. There were memes about it. People were talking about it on Reddit. A colleague even shared this Google AI result (which, yes, I know is basically the most fallible source of information on the internet) in our company slack:

So what I did was google it one more time and grab the first national article I saw—which, yes, sadly, was USA Today—and post my simple little sentence.

But I want to clarify one thing. Even then, I doubted it. I saw in his article that he had been an altar boy on the South Side. That didn’t correlate with the idea of him being a Cubs fan. But I saw no sources whatsoever saying he was a White Sox fan and every source I did find seemed to lean toward the Cubs fandom, even if one of the most-cited sources was this murky tweet:

So, what should I have done?

I still stand by my edit, although I’m glad it has been corrected.

The truth—which is now on Wikipedia and has made its way across the rest of the internet—was reported when WGN in Chicago did this interview with the pope’s brother.

But here’s why I stand by my edit: sure, it was wrong, but it was the most verifiable truth available in the moment. I also did not say “He is a Chicago Cubs fan.” I included the word reportedly, which in my mind at the time was inches from allegedly. Which means the sentence was true, even if what was being reported was not true.

And I even have to wonder something else: did the lack of verifiable sources and a half-truth on Wikipedia help lead to the full truth coming out? Was the pope’s brother motivated by seeing something he knew to be false on Wikipedia? Would he have done the interview at all if there was no mention of Cubs or White Sox on Wikipedia article for Leo XIV?

And as a side note: this was my first time participating in an “Edit conflict,” which makes for a pretty exciting editing experience.

So that’s the story of the least accurate edit I’ve ever made. But I’ll continue to stand by it.

1. I’d previously made one pope-related edit in my life, on the Talk page for Pope John Paul I.