A comet formed on the edges of the solar system will grace southern skies over the next fortnight, giving viewers a rare chance to glimpse it before it disappears from view for another 170,000 years.

The comet – known as C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS – had been travelling through the northern hemisphere but has “swung around the sun” and is now visible in the south, said Josh Aoraki, an astronomer at Te Whatu Stardome in Auckland, New Zealand.

The comet is fairly bright, but people would need binoculars, a telescope or a camera to see it, Aoraki said.

“It’s not naked-eye brightness … [but] this one is a decently easy one to photograph, which is always nice,” he said.

The comet will gradually decrease in brightness over the next two weeks, and interested viewers in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and the Pacific should aim to capture it as soon as possible, Aoraki said.

Those wishing to see the comet should find a clear, unobstructed view of the western horizon just after sunset, when the comet is still low in the sky. It will be most visible in the hour after the sun goes down.

For those who do manage to spy it, they can expect to see a blue-green orb – a temporary gas around the nucleus, called a coma – and a smudgy tail.

“You get the coma and the tail looking like a little fuzzy meteor in the sky.”

C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS originates in the Oort Cloud – a vast shell of icy comet-like objects surrounding the distant-most edges of our solar system. It was discovered in 2025 and is a long-period comet that takes roughly 170,000 years to orbit the sun – that’s if it doesn’t break apart first.

“It’s really hard to predict the trajectory of them, because as they do go around the sun, they’re losing mass, and that can change the path,” Aoraki said.

“So it could be back in that amount of time, but it also could be ejected from the solar system entirely.”

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has branded the Australian social media ban an “unmitigated disaster” and an “embarrassment” that is teaching kids to accept surveillance from tech companies when they go online.

The online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit was born in a world before social media, in 2001. But Wales told Guardian Australia that many of the ills of social media existed even in the earlier stages of the internet.

“Before social media, before Wikipedia, there was Usenet, which was like a giant, unmoderated message board,” he said.

“It was unbelievably toxic: flame wars constantly and personal attacks and just general horribleness.

“Humans don’t need algorithms to be mean to each other. We can do it on our own, so we shouldn’t be too rose-tinted about the past.”

Wales is visiting Australia in May for writers’ festivals promoting his book, Seven Rules of Trust, a look at how the model of trust between people who edit Wikipedia pages can be applied to political polarisation in modern discourse.

The seven rules include being transparent, making discussion between two people personal and being courteous.

Wales said the core bedrock rule of the Wikipedia community is no personal attacks.

“If you are attacking the other person, that’s really viewed negatively in the Wikipedia world,” he said.

“It’s very different from a lot of free-wheeling social media, where if you fly off the handle and start attacking someone, the algorithm notices that you’re causing engagement and you get promoted and get more followers.”

Wales describes the current social media environment as one where users are “just serfs on the master’s estate” where rules are made from above, enforced by “anonymous, faceless moderators” who work for the platforms.

“Whereas at Wikipedia, it’s all in the hands of the community.”

Despite his criticisms of social media – including the algorithms that are part of the Albanese government’s justification for banning under 16s from the platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok – Wales expressed his opposition to government policies, such as that in Australia, for keeping teens off social media.

“I think it’s an unmitigated disaster, and it’s an embarrassment,” he said. “When it comes with demands that we adults have to prove our age, ie identify ourselves with personally identifying information … this is madness and it’s really unsafe.”

He pointed to recent changes to gaming platform Roblox that has begun using facial age assurance for users, that then groups those users – who can be as young as five – into specific age demographic groups that can only interact with each other, which is intended to reduce the risk of adults grooming kids and other unsafe experiences on the platform.

He said teaching children to get used to turning on their cameras when prompted by a tech platform was not a good idea.

“You’re pressuring really bad, unsafe behaviour on kids,” he said.

“I think there’s a massive moral panic around young people and social media that is really unjustified.”

Wales said reflecting on the rights of young people online was a deeper societal issue. “Most of the people who are in favour of this sort of thing aren’t in favour of that surveillance state and surveillance capitalism,” he said. “I just think they haven’t really thought it through.”

He said he often comes across parents who are unaware that parental controls even exist and governments should instead be educating adults on parental controls for children’s phones.

“It’s really easy to set up on both Android and Apple … why don’t we have regulation requiring retailers to sell phones pre-configured as child phones?”

AI ‘not a disaster’ for Wikipedia

Since the arrival of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok – AI chatbots designed to answer user queries – Wales said Wikipedia had seen an 8% drop in human traffic.

“It’s not a disaster, but it seems meaningful,” he said.

Wales said the loss was largely to low-engagement traffic – people who are looking for a quick answer to a question rather than a more in-depth experience where they are “reading a dozen articles and following links and going down an educational rabbit hole”.

On the other hand, AI crawlers scouring pages for information are “really hammering” Wikipedia.

“Bot traffic is very different from human traffic,” he said. “When the Queen died, millions of people came to read that one page, so we had it cached in memory and we blasted it out. It costs very little.”

An AI bot that crawls obscure pages that aren’t held in memory, on the other hand, is “disproportionately expensive” to serve, he said.

Instead, Wikipedia’s enterprise product, allowing AI companies direct access to its database for a fee – were being encouraged “more and more firmly”, he said.

Wikipedia does not allow AI to edit Wikipedia directly, but Wales doesn’t see AI as being useless for the site and its editors. But he noted when people use AI to answer questions on a topic, it frequently makes mistakes.

“That’s especially true the more obscure the topic, the more likely it is to just make random stuff up – that’s not the case for Wikipedia,” he said. “Obscure topics tend to be quite researched by super nerds.”

Jimmy Wales appears at the Capitol in Melbourne (20 May), presented by the Wheeler Centre, and at Sydney Writers’ festival (17-24 May).