Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/In focus
 Article display preview: | This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!
| ||||
Twenty years of The Signpost! What did it take?
- How has The Signpost - a newspaper with no budget and an all-volunteer staff - created a twenty-year-long record of informing and serving the Wikipedia community? It was simple really, all we needed were many talented and dedicated contributors. As we celebrate TSP's 20th anniversary, we wish to thank all the people who brought us this far. We asked a dozen of our alumni for their comments - whatever they wanted to say. Some of them we've edited for length. The comments are as varied as the contributors. The contribution of our founder, Michael Snow is at Opinion.
- Dame Rosie helped found Women in Red, was a member of Affiliation Committee (2016-21) and a WMF board trustee (2021-2024), Co-Wikipedian of the year in 2016, and creator of the 6,000,000th article on the English Wikipedia in 2020.
In 2015, The Signpost editor-in-chief, User:Gamaliel, invited me to join the editorial staff in a new position: Human Resources Manager. In this role, my responsibilities included reviewing how volunteers interacted with each other during the full cycle of publishing each issue, and to suggest process improvements within the context of people's interactions. I noticed two issues: (a) a lag time when articles needed copyediting (so I invited two veteran editors to join TSP as copy editors: User:Montanabw and User:Megalibrarygirl); and (b) difficulty communicating quickly amongst ourselves, the options at the time being on-wiki or via email. User:Peteforsyth became the editor-in-chief in 2016, and he implemented the use of Slack, which really improved how we communicate.
The most serious event that happened while I was on staff was the late-December 2015 removal of User:Doc James from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; our entire editorial staff worked long hours on that story, which included at least one late-night all-hands emergency call. I left TSP later in 2016 after being elected to the WMF Affiliations Committee, but fond memories have lasted, and some lasting TSP relationships, too.
- From May 2012 – January 2015 Erhart served as the eighth editor-in-chief of The Signpost. He was a force for quality journalism and stability back when we were publishing weekly. He now works as a Communications Specialist at the WMF.
I got started working on the Signpost when I noticed that there was an editor-in-chief vacancy and volunteered myself. "I've worked on MILHIST's Bugle," I was thinking. "This ought to be similar."
As anyone who has ever worked on the Signpost can guess, that was hilariously naive.
My favorite articles are from the Wiki-PR investigative series, which focused on "a multi-million-dollar US-based company [...] created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts." I remain amusedly irritated even now that we did not break that story — The Daily Dot, using sources completely separate from ours, published their expose exactly one day before us.
I'd like to think that during my time at the Signpost we improved the knowledge regular Wikimedians had about the wider Wikimedia movement. We were lucky to be operating at a time when that movement was rapidly changing and becoming more complex. We worked hard to give adequate space to big-picture issues with wide implications and smaller topics that always seemed to arise in the week between our issues. We did not always get things right, but we were an overall positive force for Wikipedia and left the place better than we found it.
On a personal note, I was incredibly lucky as editor-in-chief to work with a "staff" of people who were smarter than I'll ever be. I learned a lot from them, and I owe them a debt I'll never be able to repay.
Is the Signpost today as good or better than it was back then? It's not my place to judge the Signpost's current work. I do wish y'all luck with the impossible mission of covering the Wikimedia communities, projects, and organizations that extend around the globe.
- Vysotsky, a Dutch Wikipedian, has always been enjoyable to work with, a writer with original ideas who liked having his work discussed and edited. I suggested the name "Serendipity" for his column - for his surprising interests. He wrote the column 2021-2023.
Those were the days at The Signpost. 'Serendipity' was precisely the word for my somewhat varied contributions. As always with Wikipedia, the fun was in sharing stories and thoughts. I was lucky in having an experienced editor, who helped correcting my Dunglish, set deadlines and suggested different angles. My best read piece was 'Those thieving image farms' (about Alamy et al.), which was picked up by Hacker News. On February 27, 2022 'Serendipity' featured my piece 'War photographers' about the Crimea War in the 1850s and the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 - 3 days earlier. 'Was she really a Swiss lesbian automobile racer' was most fun to write - though Anita Forrer still lacks her well-deserved Wiki-article.
.jpg)
- Jules* is an experienced admin on the French Wikipedia, who inspired our article on a French "secret shopper" project, and contributed an article to TSP about a French presidential candidate who had a secret cabal of apparent paid or COI editors. He also was the first to suggest we republish Looking for a woman, the best and most serious humour article we've published in a long time. He now offers a possible topic for us to cover.
As Elon Musk is attacking Wikipedia in the US, we, in France, saw several conservative-to-far-right newspaper pieces attacking the community the last months. In December 2024, the conservative media Le Point, unhappy that the Wikipedia article about it evoked accusations of Islamophobia, wrote a very hostile piece that disinformation had invaded Wikipedia, disputing the "conservative" or "climate-skeptic" labels of known people labeled this way by quality secondary sources. Le Point even doxed four editors (occupation and place of work) who made edits on environmental and political subjects. This paper has been quoted (exclusively) by numerous French far right media, including Europe 1 — a former mainstream radio station, recently taken over by the far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré — who used Musk's buzzword "Wokipedia". Le Point journalists had already published a piece in 2023, in collaboration with a far right news source, saying that "Transgender and ultrafeminist activists have taken up a considerable amount of space on Wikipedia". These articles contained several factual errors and were debated on the Bistro (Village Pump) (here and here).
The previously mainstream newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, bought in 2021 by the Bolloré, also published a poorly informed piece in October 2024 about the deletion of an article dedicated to the [[:Fr: Meurtre de Philippine Le Noir de Carlan|Murder of Philippine Le Noir de Carlan]] (a news story exploited by the far right), misleadingly writing about an "ideological war" in the articles for deletion debate — which was, in fact, [[:Fr: Discussion:Meurtre de Philippine Le Noi|serene]]. So did the newspaper Marianne (whose political orientation is itself debated), quoting a banned user. In November 2024, Marianne targeted Les sans pagEs project (similar to Women in Red) and its ties with the Wikimedia France chapter, making a fuss of recurring controversy within the fr-wp community about the project, and even exacerbating it — it was discussed for three consecutive days on the Village Pump (1, 2, 3).
Wikipedia being a tertiary source that prohibits original research is one of the project's greatest strengths, allowing millions of volunteers with unique perspectives – you and me included – to produce a single cohesive work that unifies all significant views found in reliable sources. However, on the topic of Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia being a tertiary source means that we can only describe ourselves in terms of how others view us. When an individual – reliably or not – discusses Wikipedia in a way that misses important context or is simply in need of a follow-up, we are only permitted to reply when published media grants us the space to do so.
The Signpost inverts the relationship between Wikipedia and the public, offering a dedicated space for us to broadcast our perspectives to the world. When a newspaper takes note of wealthy individuals using reputation management firms to whitewash their image on Wikipedia, we inform them that we are aware of the scope of the situation and actively reversing the distortion. When pundits accuse Wikipedia of bias using a selective interpretation of data, we use that same data to introduce additional information that the pundits missed. And sometimes, this leads to aggrieved reactions from individuals who may not have expected us to respond, because Wikipedia is a tertiary source.
One of the most valuable things The Signpost provides us is the right to reply to outsiders who do not necessarily comprehend all of our policies, all of the information, and all of the reasoned debates that inform our writing. As a legal standard, the right to reply is far from universal. But thanks to The Signpost and its contributors and editors of the past 20 years, we do enjoy the right to showcase our perspectives in a way that bypasses the typical epistemology of the encyclopedia: we are what we say we are, and not only what others believe us to be. And that is what makes The Signpost so quintessentially Wikipedian.
- Happy birthday, dear Wikipedia Signpost, from Russian Wikinews! (working since 2005!) (we have also English section!) As the time shows, we wish to be devoted to the same goal that you are: writing news about Wikipedia ("wiki"+"news") while Wikipedia writes about news. But current times are harsh, and we are unable to do it in a decent way, like we could do when we were making in the past the Vikivestnik — "a Russian Signpost". Vikivestnik is gone, but we always have Signpost, and are very adored about that, while knowing that there are people who keep up what we can't. Long live the Signpost!
My biggest regret is that I want to write more for The Signpost but in the end, I find creating encyclopedic content more enjoyable. But TSP is a wonderful tool that highlights important issues and makes the community a community (not by itself, of course, but is a big part of the glue thanks to which we exist). It is not perfect, of course. What could be better? Link TSP articles from talk pages of relevant Wikipedia articles ('in the media'), ping people more, categorize them better! I also find TSP archives badly organized.
Cheers, thanks for the hard work of all contributors and editors. Here's to the next 20 years!
Discuss this story
(This allows for greater visibility of discussions, makes archiving easier, and prevents discussions becoming disconnected from articles during the publication process)