It’s the first Monday after Donald Trump started implementing his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and the markets are seeing red. At the time of writing the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq are all down around four percent with the latter taking the hardest hit. And that’s on top of the S&P 500’s 10 percent fall last week. Things can still change quickly, and it’s up to historians to decide what to call Trump’s decision to push the economy off a cliff when they write their history books, but Wikipedia editors, who are arguably writing one of the first drafts of history, have already called it the “2025 stock market crash.”
“At the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, he was inaugurated inheriting a particularly strong domestic stock market,” the top section of the Wikipedia article titled “2025 stock market crash” reads. “Whilst this was maintained for a period of a few weeks after his inauguration, the Trump administration began making and announcing increasingly aggressive trade policies in an attempt to practice protectionism and economic pressure, including heightening previous trade wars, starting new trade wars, heavy tariffs, and increasing tensions with allies; most prominently, Canada. As the administration continued to practice these policies, markets began to experience continued turbulence, volatility, and general uncertainty.”
While the current title of the article definitely calls it a stock market crash, it is, like every Wikipedia article, subject to change depending on how editors continue interpreting events. The article currently includes two disclaimers. The first notes that it “may be affected by a current event,” and the “article may change rapidly as the event progresses.” The second notes that there is a pending request from some editors to change the article title to “2025 stock market decline.”
“The suggested renaming is just a placeholder,” one editor who wants to call it a “decline” said in the “talk” page where Wikipedia editors debate the decision. “I cannot find many reliable sources describing this as a "crash", at least not yet. A crash is generally considered to be a fall of >20%.[1] Most indices are bubbling around 9–10%; it is certainly contentious to label it a crash.”
The talk page for the Wikipedia article shows that previously there were two Wikipedia pages for the current economic turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs, one titled “stock market crash” and the other titled “stock market decline.” Editors agreed to merge the articles, and at least for now keep the “crash” title.
Although there is no definition of a stock market crash it's generally accepted an “‘abrupt double-digit percentage drop in a stock index over the course of a few days’” is a crash (which both have happened),” the editor said, citing Investopedia. “Also this is a really big crash, the last time the smp was at 5000 points was in April of 2024, meaning a year of progress has been wiped out in 48 hours. My personal stock portfolio dropped by 25%. But with that being said it might be better to change the title of the article to something like April 2025 stock market crash as there might be a bigger crash later.”
Just because Wikipedia says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fact. It’s a crowdsourced repository that ultimately reflects what Wikipedia editors decide. But it’s also one of the most useful and reliable repositories of information humanity has created, which feeds Google and countless other tools on the internet, and at the very least it reflects a prevailing point of view on what Trump did to the global economy.
