The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help

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The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help

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The Signpost needs your help.

Last week's issue of the Signpost was the best issue yet during my tenure as editor-in-chief. We published a lot of strong material that readers responded to positively — and sometimes negatively! My thanks to our goes to our contributors, including Andreas Kolbe, Armbrust, GamerPro64, Thibbs, Serendipodous, and the work behind the scenes of people like Tony1, Resident Mario, and others.

When people look at the quality of the issue we published and the number of contributors, I can understand why they might think the Signpost is doing just fine—but we're in trouble. During much of this year, we had a strong core of four to five editorial board members and a number of other regular contributors. More recently, however, we've lost some of those contributors, and board members either left or had to drastically reduce the time they spent on the Signpost due to real-life commitments. This includes my co-editor-in-chief, Go Phightins!, who is currently inactive but will continue to contribute sporadically. We barely have time to publish what we do publish, which is usually many days late.

The time demands are so many that we wanted to publish this piece you’re reading right now several weeks ago, but I didn’t have the time to organize and write it until now.

Some of our regular contributors create self-contained sections that can be published with little effort by others. For example, Serendipodous and Milowent create Traffic on their own—probably the most consistently high-quality section in the Signpost—and most weeks we publish it without changing anything except the occasional stray comma.

Other sections require significant work. For example, take last week's special report on GamerGate. It was originally published in the WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, so all we had to do was slap it in a page of our own, right? Not really. Let's consider how much time it took to get that piece to our readers.

First, Thibbs deserves full credit for doing nearly all of the work, from writing an excellent piece to creating the graphs and contacting the participants.
Second, however, you also have to consider the time it took the staff of the newsletter to prepare it for the original publication, as well as the time of the four interviewees and the work it took to coordinate their contributions.
Third, to publish it in the Signpost, three current and former members of the editorial board examined and copyedited it in-depth because of the piece's length and the controversial nature of the material.

As you can see, in addition to the hard work of the writers who produce our features, a lot of work goes into publishing the Signpost that goes unseen and unnoticed by our readers. But they would surely notice its absence, and as those tasks fall to fewer and fewer people, we struggle to keep the quality of the publication high.

Currently we have a very fluid organizational structure, which is a charitable way of saying we are unorganized. It has its advantages, being flexible and adaptable, but many regular tasks are not getting done and we don't have the opportunity to take on new ones. When someone brings us an exciting new idea for the Signpost, again and again our response has to be "We love it, but who’s going to do it?"

With that in mind, three members of the editorial board met at WikiConference and hammered out a reorganization plan. "Compartmentalization" is the key word; we want to take regular tasks and distribute them among more people so they get done regularly and don't fall on just a few people, prompting them to burn out and leave. We've sketched out a structure and we'd like to find people to fill these roles. We still want to be flexible; more than one person could share the duties of a single role, or, more likely, one person could take on more than one role.

Under this plan, the Signpost will still be coordinated by an editor-in-chief. They will also help fill in whatever roles are needed temporarily. The new editorial board will consist of the EIC and eight associate editors. Four of them will be responsible for coordinating and publishing (but not writing) each week's edition. This includes coordinating with contributors, copyediting, and making sure that their sections are publication-ready, with images and conforming to the Signpost style guide.

News: News and Notes, In the Media, Arbitration Report, and Technology Report. This role will be filled by Andreas Kolbe.
Features: Featured Content, Traffic, WikiProject Report, Recent Research, Gallery, Tech News, and Blog.
Editorial: Op-eds and Editorial. This role will be filled by me.
Special Reports/Projects: This role will be filled by Tony1.

They will be assisted by four others:

Publication: This person will coordinate with the content editors to set a publication time and will be the person responsible for performing the publication process. A bot does most of the work; the primary tasks are organizing the front page each week (writing snippets and choosing an image) and cleaning up whatever the bot missed when it skips a step. This person will have to be comfortable enough with wiki-markup to cut and paste whatever is missing from the publication instruction page to the appropriate Signpost pages.
Personnel and recruitment: We need a people person. This role will be responsible for the care, upkeep, and recruitment of contributors and dealing with any issues.
Social media and outreach: This person will be responsible for promoting the Signpost via social media (primarily Facebook and Twitter, but an ambitious individual could branch out) and for making sure suggestions get to the appropriate editor.
Style/Tagging/Templates: This person will be responsible for maintaining the Signpost's style guide, templates, and tagging initiative. This role will be filled by Resident Mario.

Of course, none of these people would have any work to do if it weren't for our contributors. There has traditionally been an overlap between the roles of editor and contributor, but we and our readers don't want the same people writing everything every week.

Even if you don't want to commit to a weekly role on the Signpost, we need your help writing the content for these sections, even if you only contribute an occasional small piece to a section like In the Media or Featured Content. Feel free to contact the editor for the section you are interested in, or just dive into a draft article and start writing.

We realize this is an ambitious plan, but we don't have any choice but to try. The alternatives mean, at minimum, a lower-quality and less-frequent Signpost. If we don't get more help soon, the next step will be to permanently cancel regular sections and make the Signpost a bi-weekly or monthly publication.

We don't want to fall silent like our sibling publications on the French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Thank you for reading and supporting Wikipedia's weekly newspaper.

— Gamaliel, Signpost editor-in-chief

In this issue

28 October 2015 (all comments)

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Does this mean we can finally unionize? GamerPro64 18:28, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Settle down, Norma Rae. We have to pay you first before you can unionize. Gamaliel (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay… Does this mean we finally get paid? GamerPro64 18:42, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

fr.wiki's RAW isn't weekly; its latest issue appeared in October, it's not that dead after all :) --Elitre (talk) 19:25, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We were told they were going on hiatus. Perhaps something was lost in translation? Gamaliel (talk) 19:51, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

+1. I talked with Cantons, and they've already missed the 23rd/I don't see anything for the 6th coming along. :-/ Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 20:57, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I especially like the statement that the Signpost gets some great ideas for articles, but they need more writers to produce them. Having gone through the archives extensively, I don't think I saw times when the Signpost didn't have enough subjects to write about, it's always a matter of having enough contributors to cover all of the story ideas, news beats and discussion reports that are possible and suggested. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:18, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Off-topic discussion about race, because reasons. You are welcome to read, participate, or just point and laugh, but this has nothing to do with the organizational structure of the Signpost.

It has recently become my opinion that a majority of Wikipedians are not really a well-represented demographic here, given their skin color ("white" as if ghosts, scary and unwelcome) and gender (e.g., where locker room phrases like "mansplaining" cause little concern). It has become my opinion that this publication is becoming more and more a political tool to annoy and harass ("molest") European male Wikipedians, likely also harbouring other minority and extremist political ideologies, under the guise of empowerment and equality and who knows what else.

And at the same time, it seems to have adopted an uncanny similarity to political warfare widely adopted by European males: seeking control of social institutions (Wikipedia) by seeking control of their institutions of violence (ArbCom in this case, their decisions more-or-less being enforceable in SF courts and their associated US police and paramilitary forces), and attacks (propaganda and using the instutitions of violence) on "oppresors" and other enemies as a method of fearmongering meant to aid in the raising of morale and troops, but also meant to push their opponents into more extremist and minority positions.

The Signpost seems dominated with editors consumed by hatred and fear. I primarily edit articles about European government institutions, the traditional political instiutions of European males, knowing full well the violence they are responsible for causing. I consider it so important becuase the Signpost makes it clear that there is a significant political movement to retrain this violence once again, obviously unaware of the historical fate that awaits such attempts. We're not out of the woods yet, so don't go starting a forest fire. Int21h (talk) 22:00, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well, is it the Traffic Report that is victimizing European male Wikipedians and promoting extremist political ideology or is it Featured Content? Your assertions might have some weight if you actually provided evidence of your over-the-top claims. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:27, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Internal divisions of the Signpost are distinctions without a difference. It is the heavy use of gender-, sexual- and ethnicity-oriented content in general that has piqued my interest. Those are common political topics worldwide, but nonetheless are often precursors to gender, sexual and ethnic discrimination, and I think it is increasingly going that way. I focused on the term "mansplaining" because it was the most obvious, but I didn't really consider the assumption underlying most of the dicussion: (a) that a majority European male population is bad, and/or (b) that a majority European male population must be suppressed.

I'm not even sure what would be considered "evidence". I think it would be more efficient to let someone else prove it, especially since I am not very knowledgeable on the topic of "class warfare", but it is on my list of things to do when my primary editing goals are sufficiently met. Int21h (talk) 23:26, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You do realize that the entire Signpost editorial board is made up of all white (and one slightly off-white) males of European descent? Gamaliel (talk) 22:28, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

While that is an intriguing facet of psychology, it is well known feature of the topic. E.g., wealthy landowners supporting (even being the main force behind) a political movement for radical land reform and redistribution of wealth does not magically mean that movement does not exist as such. Int21h (talk) 22:58, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How does one conduct a paramilitary overthrow of an internet encyclopedia exactly? Asking for a friend. Gamaliel (talk) 00:29, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you to everyone who contacted me privately or on my talk page to potentially volunteer. Give me a day or so to contact you. Everyone else, keep those requests coming! Gamaliel (talk) 03:29, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Preexisting conflict

@Gamaliel: - I think The Signpost's coverage of Wikipedia's gender issues has been absolutely laudable, but it feels a bit bizarre to me to then turn around and make a man who wrote this and this responsible for Special Reports/Projects. Does your concern about the treatment of women on the project not extend to men who like to call women editors "bitches"? The Drover's Wife (talk) 04:06, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

First, no one "makes" me responsible for special reports—I might deign to do it if I feel like it. it's not a paid job. Second, "bitchy" is far from calling someone "a bitch". And you're proving right here that the epithet (not the noun, which you dishonestly throw around here) was exactly what you deserved. I wouldn't have a clue what gender you were ("wife" proves nothing, and if anything your username is pretty sexist ... someone's wife, are you?), but the other editor I called that at the time I know was male. Where does that leave your twisted logic? Tony (talk) 12:38, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tony1 has been an indispensible part of the Signpost well before I ever contributed here. All I did was put a title to something he's already been doing for a long time. I'm sorry you had a disagreement with him, and I'm not going to defend or excuse whatever someone thinks he may have done wrong during that disagreement as that has nothing to do with the Signpost or anyone else here, just as the many disagreements I've had with users over the decade that I've been a Wikipedia editor and the many instances where I acted poorly should not reflect upon my colleagues here or this publication. Obviously I am concerned about the treatment of women, and editors of any gender, race, or nationality, on Wikipedia. That doesn't change just because I acted like an asshat here in the past. The fact that I acted in poorly in the past doesn't make me a hypocrite, that doesn't make my concerns invalid, that just makes me a regular, flawed, imperfect human being. I'll take a flawed person who strives to do right by the encyclopedia any day over a person who says we shouldn't be concerned about how we treat others here, and loudly insists that they should be allowed to be terrible to anyone at any time. Gamaliel (talk) 04:41, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, I think you're terrific and respect you highly, and none of this was a criticism of you. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of rightfully pointing out that tolerating and supporting a man who thinks calling women "cunts" is probably not great for encouraging the inclusion of women on the project, while happily collaborating with someone who likes to call women "bitches" with a rationale that could be Eric's word for word except for the different slur. The Drover's Wife (talk) 16:36, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You are a vile, detestable person. "For what it's worth", this appears to be pay-back for my calling out of the Australian chapter for its illegal behaviour. I believe s/he communes with them. Tony (talk) 00:46, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, that "illegal behaviour" was choosing a spelling of "notice board" over "noticeboard". As if this doesn't even more clearly demonstrate that Tony1's attitude towards and means of communicating with women editors is no different from Eric Corbett's. One tends to remember the men who unashamedly throw around misogynist slurs at women editors. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:32, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, no, I'm referring to several years of wrongdoing by the committee of WMAU—breaking its electoral rules, for example. See Meta for the current issue. Thank you for your concern, which has not been duly noted. Tony (talk) 04:07, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A concise, informative, neutrally toned weekly newsletter would be a great asset for Wikipedia editors. The present Signpost is very far from that and instead has become a vehicle for grandstanding and personal crusades. I've stopped contributing or even reading the thing: Noyster (talk), 10:34, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If you want the Signpost to be a glass of warm milk before bedtime, then I am not the editor for you.

There's nothing wrong with wanting that, of course. There's a place for newsletters with a sedate tone, like the Wikidata Newsletter or Books and Bytes. But the Signpost attempts to cover all of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. Wikipedia is the seventh largest website in the world, by traffic. Wikimedia is a gigantic global movement of hundreds of projects in hundreds of languages, with contributors from every continent. It is the world. And that world deserves a newspaper and not a newsletter. I want that newspaper to reflect that cacophony of global voices. I want it loud, boisterous, and opinionated. I want it to piss them off and make them think. I want to turn it up to eleven. I want to be your angry conscience buzzing in your ear like you have tinnitus. I want to be H.L. Mencken or Walter Cronkite. I want to feed off the hostile voices of vested interests who don't like being called out like a kid devouring a bag of Halloween candy.

But I'm just one guy, and what I want most is for the Signpost to have a diversity of voices and opinions. This week the Signpost had ten sections, and the week before it had nine. I write a chunk of the Signpost but I don't write all of it, or even most of it, and whatever issues people have with me have nothing to do with the people who write, say, Traffic or Recent Research, or the quality content they produce. If you don't like what I have to say, the best way to drown me out is to add more and different voices to the chorus of contributors here. Gamaliel (talk) 14:30, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

" I want it loud, boisterous, and opinionated." As long as those opinions are wiki-politically correct -- otherwise: [1], [2], [3], [4]. As long as the Signpost model is National Inquirer rather than Washington Post folks with any sort of sense are going to be ignoring it. NE Ent 14:27, 7 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If you can't tell the difference between vigorous debate and copyright violations, trolling, and harassment, the National Inquirer is your model. Gamaliel (talk) 15:47, 7 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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