The Signpost
WP:POST/N
Newsroom


Welcome to the central hub of The Signpost!

This is The Signpost Newsroom, a place where The Signpost team can coordinate with writers, both regular and occasional, and people who have suggestions for topics to cover. See the boxes below if you have suggestions (something for the team to write about in regular columns), proposal/submissions (for articles you want to write/have written yourself), or want to create a pre-formatted draft article in your userspace, with helpful links and easy-to-edit syntax. Discussion occurs both here and in the Signpost Discord.

Discussion of upcoming issues is done at the newsroom talk page. For general feedback on The Signpost as a whole, go to our talk page. To learn more about The Signpost, see our about page.

The Signpost currently has 5913 articles, 733 issues, and 14557 pages (4801 talk and 9756 non-talk).

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Below here is an automatically generated master list of every page whose title starts with Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/. It's automatically generated by SDZeroBot every day. Also consult the mockup page for the next issue to make sure all of their titles, images and blurbs are correct.

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yes yes no Signpost drafts, ready for final check 11
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In the media

In progress · 7,395b
last edited 2026-09-27 00:22:49 by Bri
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Sunshine Hills Reality Edit

[edit]

I'm starting to see some reviews of Sunshine Hills Reality Edit (Tina Connolly), in a post-truth world with a Wikipedia-like entity. The book doesn't even have an article yet as far as I can see. Going to wait just a bit and see if a) it is notable and b) if more reviews appear. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:42, 26 September 2026 (UTC)reply

News and notes

In progress · 9,094b
last edited 2026-09-25 16:32:57 by Bri
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News from Diff

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Op-ed

In progress · 9,115b
last edited 2026-09-25 12:17:23 by 1F616EMO
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This is from a new Signpost contributor user:1F616EMO who is an experienced Chinese language Wikipedia editor zh:user:1F616EMO~nya. I am sharing here to request early feedback. I have asked them to provide images over the placeholders in there now.

They confirmed that they wrote the piece with their own ideas but did use AI for copyediting. I do not think this needs further disclosure for AI but if anyone has another opinion then share. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:22, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Author might want to check the difference between idioms "go off track" and "run off the rails". ☆ Bri (talk) 22:36, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Thanks for your advice, fixed in diff with AI assistance on understanding the idioms. 1F616EMO (talk) 04:16, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
We should pay attention to the reasonable readers, that is, those who agree to our vision and code of conduct, the five pillars, policies and guidelines, and applicable consensuses. I would suggest that the wording around this be revised, I don't think that disagreeing with some aspects of Wikipedia makes a reader unreasonable, which is heavily implied by this statement. I do think this is a good article overall, but I think the tone could be revised a bit to be less exclusionary to those with a different perspective of the encyclopedia but can nonetheless be valuable contributors to the project. Mitchsavl (talk) 01:04, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Sorry that I used the wrong word. Almost all "unreasonable" should be "improper", as in WP:CONACHIEVE: "A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised", and the implied counterpart - such a decision does not take into account any improper concerns raised. I wrote the essay with both Chinese and English Wikipedia in mind, and that resulted in awkward, non-native wordings. I will revise the essay later today to reflect this.
And by writing the essay, I did not mean to exclude those who raised improper concerns as a person, but to exclude those specific concerns and, as a precaution, be extra careful to other opinions they give. Of course, they can still contribute to our movement, given that they do not insist when it is better to move on, or put something into action to prove the community wrong.
The tone is intentionally exclusionary due to my Chinese Wikipedia background. On my home wiki, there is a surprisingly high tolerance to disrupters, that administrators often fail to prevent those who insist on improper concerns from further disrupting, repeat offenders are often released from a block on the sole basis of a simple promise, and the / are vote-based. The tone could be revised, but the core idea should prevail: We, as stewards of our mission, should safeguard our projects from improper demands; we may advocate and invite them into our mission, and alternatively guide them to the correct venue, but if all efforts failed, we would have no choice but to force them away. 1F616EMO (talk) 02:33, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Opinion

In progress · 26,854b
last edited 2026-09-25 02:57:09 by Bri
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A lot of users have said that the news was very concerning If I was writing this piece, I would not say this. I would say something more along the lines of Several users such as Username 1 and Username 2 indicated heightened concern for the reliability of CBS. I would then reach out to Username1 and Username 2 for comment and find new information about how they think about the future of news.Czarking0 (talk) 20:09, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Hi, sorry didn't see this before, I didn't reached out yet, do you have anyone in mind for this piece? Or perhaps I can find some from the CBS RfC. Thanks again. 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕮𝖆𝖙𝕻𝖊𝖓𝖈𝖎𝖑 𝕿𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖘 (talk) 20:17, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Recent research

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Serendipity

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Technology report

In progress · 8,991b
last edited 2026-09-23 10:12:25 by Mitchsavl
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Traffic report

In progress · 19,359b
last edited 2026-09-26 07:17:26 by Hason-LEK-SIN
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On the bright side

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Community view

In progress · 14,453b
last edited 2026-09-15 13:28:30 by Jim.henderson
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Special report

In progress · 86,735b
last edited 2026-09-24 17:48:42 by Bri
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Just took a quick scan over the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Special report. It's very long. But it's in four sections. Maybe it should be carried as a multi-part thing over more than one issue? ☆ Bri (talk) 05:05, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply

I think this should in part be edited down. If I ctrl+p I see 32 pages. About half of that is prose. Given that this is essentially an opinion piece I think limiting to about 5 pages of prose would be reasonable. This is especially because it is clearly AI written. AI written tends to be longer in a way that is not beneficial to the reader. Czarking0 (talk) 05:48, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Consider footnote 7. Currently 93 words. It could be
Analytics data are fuzzed for privacy or unavailable for many languages. Geolocation incorrectly shows U.S., France, or Singapore for some data.
I don't think meaningful content in the 93-word footnote are lost in this proposed 20-word rewrite. Radical streamlining of more content would benefit the piece. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:23, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
For many reasons (data consistency and quality, external trends, and a crabload of other things)
This could be a phrase that just doesn’t exist in my dialect of English, but I’ve never heard anyone say a ‘crabload’ before, and Wiktionary gives no result for it. Is this a phrase? If not, should it be changed? Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 (𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨) (any/all) In solidarity. 03:25, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I assume it's a spoonerism for crapload. ☆ Bri (talk) 04:33, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply
That makes sense; I’ll leave it as it is. Cheers, 𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯 (𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔨) (any/all) In solidarity. 06:02, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I just made a copyedit pass but it didn't center on concision. At this time the piece is fundamentally problematic because it is a bunch of data science[a] with some very useful observations about intervention to convert readership to editors sprinkled in, followed by what looks like a footnote about changes in governance and accelerating experiments to reverse bad trends. This isn't very readable. The data should support the central arguments, instead it looks like a research paper with some blushing personal observations. To the author: get out there more with your opinions and urgent call to action; I think this is by far the most important part of the writing. Make the research the footnotes, or links to completely different essay pages if that works better. Or as the English expression goes, don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:34, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply
If I can be so bold, I've re-outlined the piece this way.
Problems
  • Readership is falling, masked by bot traffic
  • Core medium-edit-count editors are falling, masked by a temporary reprieve due time on editors' hands and lack of alternatives to online activity during COVID lockdowns
  • Growth only seen in high-edit-count editors (concentration risk)
  • Community ossification and social cost of making mistakes discourages innovation
Solutions
  • New governance model
  • New relationship to readers as a resource of future editors
  • Less glorification of high-edit-count contributors
  • New relationship to AI providers as a straight-up "truth" provider, better exposure of source qualifications
I'm not so sure about the solutions, I may have mis-understood or mis-prioritized. That's actually a problem because already at this point my time reading and re-reading is probably much higher than the average Signpost reader, who you are trying to persuade.
My advice is to lay it out very clearly as a set of really severe problems that undermine sustainability. An introduction section could lay out the problems without any research, then there could be a section that just provides a gloss of the thorough research providing evidence that those problems exist. Then get into the solutions with gusto. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:02, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Notes

  1. ^ Example 1: Over five pages (in my reader) are devoted to showing that about three quarters of the "desktop readers" are actually scraper bots. You could just assert that in the article, and back it up elsewhere. Example 2: Goodness of fit analysis of the models probably doesn't need to be done here.

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By the numbers

In progress · 34,323b
last edited 2026-09-24 10:30:45 by PAC2
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Op-ed

In progress · 9,115b
last edited 2026-09-25 12:17:23 by 1F616EMO
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This is from a new Signpost contributor user:1F616EMO who is an experienced Chinese language Wikipedia editor zh:user:1F616EMO~nya. I am sharing here to request early feedback. I have asked them to provide images over the placeholders in there now.

They confirmed that they wrote the piece with their own ideas but did use AI for copyediting. I do not think this needs further disclosure for AI but if anyone has another opinion then share. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:22, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply

Author might want to check the difference between idioms "go off track" and "run off the rails". ☆ Bri (talk) 22:36, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Thanks for your advice, fixed in diff with AI assistance on understanding the idioms. 1F616EMO (talk) 04:16, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
We should pay attention to the reasonable readers, that is, those who agree to our vision and code of conduct, the five pillars, policies and guidelines, and applicable consensuses. I would suggest that the wording around this be revised, I don't think that disagreeing with some aspects of Wikipedia makes a reader unreasonable, which is heavily implied by this statement. I do think this is a good article overall, but I think the tone could be revised a bit to be less exclusionary to those with a different perspective of the encyclopedia but can nonetheless be valuable contributors to the project. Mitchsavl (talk) 01:04, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Sorry that I used the wrong word. Almost all "unreasonable" should be "improper", as in WP:CONACHIEVE: "A consensus decision takes into account all of the proper concerns raised", and the implied counterpart - such a decision does not take into account any improper concerns raised. I wrote the essay with both Chinese and English Wikipedia in mind, and that resulted in awkward, non-native wordings. I will revise the essay later today to reflect this.
And by writing the essay, I did not mean to exclude those who raised improper concerns as a person, but to exclude those specific concerns and, as a precaution, be extra careful to other opinions they give. Of course, they can still contribute to our movement, given that they do not insist when it is better to move on, or put something into action to prove the community wrong.
The tone is intentionally exclusionary due to my Chinese Wikipedia background. On my home wiki, there is a surprisingly high tolerance to disrupters, that administrators often fail to prevent those who insist on improper concerns from further disrupting, repeat offenders are often released from a block on the sole basis of a simple promise, and the / are vote-based. The tone could be revised, but the core idea should prevail: We, as stewards of our mission, should safeguard our projects from improper demands; we may advocate and invite them into our mission, and alternatively guide them to the correct venue, but if all efforts failed, we would have no choice but to force them away. 1F616EMO (talk) 02:33, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply



∑ 2 items | Query runtime: 0.02 s | Last updated: 03:25, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

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