Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/In focus
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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 celebrate and 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 and a WMF board trustee (2001-2024), Co-Wikipedian of the year in 2016, and creator of the 6,000,000th article on the English Wikipedia.
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:Montana 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:DocJames 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.
- Vysotsky has always been enjoyable to work with, a writer with his own interests and ideas who liked having his work discussed and edited. I named the column "Serendipity" for him - it just seemed so obvious at the time. He wrote the column 2021-2023 -S
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 24 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.
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- 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 [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 newspapers pieces attacking the community the last months. In December 2024, the conservative media Le Point, unhappy that the Wikipedia article devoted to him evoked accusations of Islamophobia, wrote in an very hostile piece that disinformation 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 took over by the far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré — who used Musk's buzzword "Wokipedia". "Le Point" journalist had already published a piece in 2023, in collaboration with a far right media, 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 Village Pump (here and here).
The previously mainstream newspaper "Le Journal du Dimanche", bought in 2021 by the same Vincent Bolloré, also published a poorly informed piece in October 2024 about the deletion of an article dedicated to the 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, 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 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.
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!
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