The Signpost (formerly The Wikipedia Signpost) is the Wikimedia movement's online newspaper. Managed by the volunteer community, it is published online with contributions from Wikimedia editors. The newspaper's scope includes the Wikimedia community and events related to Wikipedia, including Arbitration Committee rulings, Wikimedia Foundation issues, and other Wikipedia-related projects. It was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedian Michael Snow, who continued as a contributor until his February 2008 appointment to the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.
Former editor-in-chief The ed17 noted that during his tenure, from 2012 to 2015, the publication expanded its scope to report on the wider Wikimedia movement in addition to Wikipedia and its community.[2] After it reported on the changes to European freedom of panorama law in June 2015, a number of publications referred to The Signpost for further information.
Signpost founder Michael Snow later chaired the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees.
The online newspaper, first published in January 2005 as The Wikipedia Signpost, was later renamed The Signpost.[3][5] It was founded by the lawyer Michael Snow, a Wikipedian who later chaired the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.[3][4] Similar efforts had been made with Wikipedia:Announcements by Larry Sanger on November 20, 2001,[6][7]Wikimedia News on Meta-Wiki November 14, 2002,[8] and Wikipedia-Kurier in the German Wikipedia on December 10, 2003.[9]
Snow wrote in its first issue: "I hope this will be a worthwhile source of news for people interested in what is happening around the Wikipedia community",[10] and said that The Signpost's name was suggested by the Wikipedia practice of editors digitally signing talk-page posts.[10] He stepped down as editor of The Signpost in August 2005, continuing to write for the newspaper until his February 2008 appointment to the board of trustees.[11] User Ral315 succeeded Snow as editor, writing in his first post: "I'd like to personally thank Michael for his work on the Signpost; it was a great idea that really helped Wikipedians learn more about the happenings on Wikipedia."[12] He conducted a survey for The Signpost in September 2007, estimating a weekly readership of approximately 2,800 Wikipedia users based on survey results.[13]
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In July 2008, Ral315 wrote about transparency for The Signpost, acknowledging that at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, the newspaper had decided not to publish an article about a pending legal case against the foundation.[14] According to the editor, "I feel this was an unfortunate, but necessary move"; because of the newspaper's affiliation with the Wikimedia Foundation, an article about the lawsuit "might have had a severe effect on the case."[14] Ral315 expressed concern about the future impact of the decision: "I'm still rather troubled by the very nature of this situation because it was the first time that I've felt pressured by the Wikimedia Foundation not to write or publish a story. This also leaves us with a dangerous precedent that I'm hoping only to keep in the most serious cases."[14]
Wikipedia community members working on The Signpost at a conference in New York City, 2009
The Signpost published its 200th issue in November 2008.[15] A total of 1,731 articles had been published, written by 181 contributors.[15] Wikipedia user Ragesoss took over as editor of the newspaper in February 2009, in an issue that featured a new layout.[16] Ragesoss resigned as editor in June 2010, and HaeB took over as the newspaper debated changing its name from The Wikipedia Signpost to The Signpost.[17] That year, sister Wikipedia publications managed by volunteer contributors included The Wikipedia Weekly, a podcast, and The Wikizine, a news bulletin.[18][19]
HaeB resigned as editor after he was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2011: "It would make it too much of a conflict of interest if I were to continue to make final editorial decisions for a community-run publication."[20] After three interim editors-in-chief,[21] Wikipedia user The ed17 took over in May 2012 as The Signpost's eighth editor.[22] He previously edited The Bugle, the publication of the WikiProject dedicated to improving the encyclopedia's military history articles.[22] The International Business Times noted in a 2013 article that The Signpost'sinvestigative journalism uncovered a link between the Wiki-PR firm and conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia.[23]
2015 reporting by The Signpost on changes to freedom of panorama copyright restrictions in Europe was covered by publications in several languages, including German, Italian, Polish, and Russian.
After its June 2015 reporting on the likelihood of increased copyright restrictions in Europe involving changes to freedom of panorama,[28]The Signpost was consulted for information by publications in several languages, including English,[29][30] German,[24] Italian,[25] Polish,[26][31] and Russian.[27]
Heise Online highlighted the use of a papal conclave image in a Signpost article about the controversy with Wikimedia Foundation executive director Lila Tretikov, saying that it symbolized pressure on the foundation's board of trustees.
Wikipedia users Gamaliel and Go Phightins! became editors-in-chief of The Signpost in January 2015.[2] The ed17 noted that during his tenure, the newspaper expanded its scope beyond the English Wikipedia to the wider Wikimedia movement.[2] In a January 2015 tenth-anniversary retrospective, Gamaliel emphasized that further improvements to the newspaper depended on collaboration and involvement by the Wikipedia community and invited users to contribute suggestions and join the editing team.[33] In their first issue of the newspaper as editors-in-chief, Go Phightins! and Gamaliel wrote about The Signpost's unique role: "We will strive to maintain our voice and standing as an independent entity, separate from the WMF, Wikimedia chapters, WikiEd, or other entities."[34]
In January 2016, Fortune and Ars Technica relied on The Signpost in reporting a vote of no confidence by Wikipedia editors against Arnnon Geshuri joining the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.[35][36] While reporting in February 2016 about controversy and confusion at the Wikimedia Foundation concerning executive director Lila Tretikov remaining in her position, The Signpost illustrated its article with a photo of black smoke emanating from a chimney in reference to the papal conclave used to select a pope.[32] According to Heise Online, the photo indicated pressure on the board to take action.[32] Andreas Kolbe wrote for The Signpost "that the creation of a successful search engine would transform volunteers into 'unpaid hamsters.'"[37]
Go Phightins! and Gamaliel remained co-editors-in-chief until the latter's resignation from Wikipedia in May 2016;[38] Go Phightins! would continue until August, when the role was passed to Andreas Kolbe and Pete Forsyth.[39] In November of that year, Kolbe departed,[40] and in June 2017, Evad37 assumed the role of sole editor-in-chief.[citation needed] Between 2018 and 2019, Bri and Kudpung both edited several issues;[41][42] in March 2019, Smallbones was selected as the next editor-in-chief.[citation needed] In May 2022, he retired from the position, succeeded by EpicPupper and JPxG, who were co-editors-in-chief until the former's resignation in September of that year.[43] Currently, the editor-in-chief is JPxG.[1]
In 2018, a Signpost article by writer (and later editor-in-chief) Smallbones broke the news that World Patent Marketing, a company whose advisory board included then-acting United States Attorney GeneralMatthew Whitaker, had likely made inappropriate edits to Whitaker's Wikipedia article, saying: "an editor with an account name almost identical to that of a WPM PR agent, as named in the FOIA release edited the article on Whitaker, adding external links in the text to both WPM's website and Whitaker's law office";[44] this was subsequently reported on, and cited, by The Wall Street Journal and Newser.[45][46]
In 2023, a report in The Signpost claimed that there may have been manipulation of several Wikipedia pages related to Gautam Adani and his companies, by use of sock puppets. This story was then picked up by multiple Indian news outlets, including The Times of India and The Hindu.[47][48]
Content
The Signpost publishes stories relating to the Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia Foundation, and other Wikipedia-related projects,[49][50][51][52] and is provided free of charge.[53][54] The Wikipedia community manages the newspaper. From 2005 to March 2016, The Signpost was published weekly. In April 2016, the nominal periodicity was changed to "fortnightly" (every two weeks) due to a shortage of contributors.[55] But in January and February 2017 only three issues were published,[56] and none in March, April or May. It is now published monthly. Readers may choose to be notified of a new issue by email or, with a Wikipedia account, on their user talk page.[57]
The newspaper informs Wikipedia editors about ongoing collaborative projects to improve articles on the site[58] and is a location for centralized notices of recent academic studies about Wikipedia.[5]The Signpost includes an arbitration report, formerly known as "The Report on Lengthy Litigation", which details proceedings by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee.[59]
The Signpost archives are publicly available, facilitating study of the history of Wikipedia.[60]
Analysis
In a 2009 article in the peer-reviewedacademic journalSociological Forum, Piotr Konieczny called The Signpost an example of a subcommunity within the larger Wikipedia community.[61] In the social-movements journal Interface that year, Konieczny cited The Signpost as part of the "complexity and richness of those organizations" in which people can volunteer their time on the site.[62]
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dartmouth College relied on Signpost archives to track Wikipedia editing outages, presenting their findings at the 2011 IEEEIWIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence.[63] In her 2013 study of Wikipedia and its reputation in higher education in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship, Gemma Bayliss reviewed the Signpost Twitter feed to confirm the timeliness of her research.[64]
Reception
If you expect to continue editing at Wikipedia ... subscribe to ... The Wikipedia Signpost.
In 2007 The New York Times called The Signpost a "mocked-up newspaper" with a retro style characteristic of Wikipedia and "its own special brand of kitsch".[65] In his 2008 book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton recommended The Signpost as essential reading for aspiring Wikipedia contributors: "If you expect to continue editing at Wikipedia for any length of time, by all means subscribe to ... The Wikipedia Signpost."[57]
Fortune called The Signpost "Wikipedia's insider newspaper".[35] In a 2016 article The Register's executive editor, Andrew Orlowski, called The Signpost "Wikipedia's own plucky newsletter."[66] According to Ars Technica tech-policy editor Joe Mullin, documents were leaked to (and published by) The Signpost about the Knight Foundation's Knowledge Engine grant for a Wikimedia Foundation search-engine project in February 2016.[67] Writing about the Knowledge Engine controversy, Nonprofit Quarterly editor-in-chief Ruth McCambridge directed technically minded readers to The Signpost "to better understand what was being planned."[68] In his article for the German magazine Heise Online, Torsten Kleinz wrote: "When official communications ground to a halt, The Signpost ... jumped into the breach, brought unknown facts to light and initiated an informed discussion."[69]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".
Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who worked as Deputy General Counsel and then as Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously he was an attorney at Mozilla, where he worked on the revision of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). He continued that work in his next job at Greenberg Traurig where he was part of the team defending Google against Oracle's claims concerning Android. Prior to graduating from Columbia Law School in 2009, he was an employee at Ximian, which was acquired by Novell in 2003. He spent a year as a "senior geek in residence" at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society working on StopBadware.org. He has been elected four times to the board of the GNOME Foundation. He was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, and blogs regularly. He was a director of the Open Source Initiative from April 2012 to March 2015.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. In addition, the foundation hosts 14 other related content projects. It supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.
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In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The Waray Wikipedia is the Waray language edition of Wikipedia. It is hosted on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation since September 25, 2005. As of April 27, 2024, this edition has 1,266,433 articles and is the 16th largest Wikipedia edition. The Waray Wikipedia has very few active users (64), and instead owes its large size to automatically generated articles created by bots, most of them by Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot.
Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia is a 2010 American documentary film that explores the history and cultural implications of the online, editable encyclopedia Wikipedia. The film considers the question of whether all individuals or just experts should be tasked with editing an encyclopedia.
Censorship of Wikipedia by governments has occurred widely in countries including China, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Some instances are examples of widespread Internet censorship in general that includes Wikipedia content. Others are indicative of measures to prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. The duration of different blocks has varied from hours to years.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing of most concern on Wikipedia is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes. Several Wikipedia policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
Hampton Lintorn-Catlin is an American computer programmer, programming language inventor, gay rights advocate, and author, best known as the creator of the Sass and Haml markup languages. Hampton was a Vice President of Engineering at Rent the Runway, and has previously held similar roles at Moovweb, Wordset, and at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is currently Chief Technology Officer at Thriveworks.
Wiki-PR was a consulting firm that marketed the ability to edit Wikipedia by "directly edit[ing] your page using our network of established Wikipedia editors and admins".
James M. Heilman is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia.
Various publications and commentators have predicted the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence. Multiple potential dangers have been proposed, such as poor quality control and inconsistent editors/administrators.
Wikimedia in India refers to all the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects which are of special interest to people in India or interested in topics relating to India.
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1 2 Okoli, Chitu; Mehdi, Mohamad; Mesgari, Mostafa; Nielsen, Finn Årup; Lanamäki, Arto (October 24, 2012). "The people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia". SSRN. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2021326. SSRN2021326.
↑ Ragesoss (February 16, 2009). "From the editor: A new leaf". The Wikipedia Signpost. Archived from the original on June 10, 2021. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
↑ Reagle, Joseph Michael (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press. pp.9, 178. ISBN978-0262014472.
↑ Tony1; Andreas Kolbe (July 4, 2016). "Brief notes". The Signpost. Archived from the original on October 11, 2016. Retrieved July 19, 2016.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
↑ Bayliss, Gemma (January 2013). "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions". New Review of Academic Librarianship. 19 (1): 39. doi:10.1080/13614533.2012.740439. ISSN1361-4533. S2CID61150982.
Ral315 (February 25, 2008). "Signpost interview: Michael Snow". The Wikipedia Signpost. Archived from the original on February 21, 2021. Retrieved March 1, 2016.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Ral315 (July 7, 2008). "From the editor: Transparency". The Wikipedia Signpost. Archived from the original on June 10, 2021. Retrieved March 1, 2016.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Ral315 (November 24, 2008). "From the editor: 200th issue". The Wikipedia Signpost. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved March 1, 2016.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Ragesoss (February 16, 2009). "From the editor: A new leaf". The Wikipedia Signpost. Archived from the original on June 10, 2021. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
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