This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page. |
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Issue No. 9, 5-18-1923, 105-116, p.2
This was published in the photo section of Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi by Thomas Weber, who credits Simplicissimus. I don't want to put the image up myself unless and until I'm certain that it meets Wikipedia's licensing criteria, but in any case Simplicissimus is a real gold mine! In this wise I was amazed to see that it doesn't have, and has never had, a project of its own. Is it all public domain? Does it go on a case-by-case basis? Do we have to wait 100 years? Is this the earliest known satire of Adolf Hitler‽!‽ Tell me, Teutons! kencf0618 (talk) 10:50, 15 May 2022 (UTC)
A motion for summary judgment was filed about a week ago on behalf of the Internet Archive in a lawsuit by Hachette and others against the Internet Archive. The motion refers in many places (see eg page 18) to the use of Internet Archive books on Wikipedia. I'm wondering if anyone at IA or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is defending IA in the lawsuit, would do an interview about WP's role in the litigation? AleatoryPonderings (talk) 03:09, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
The article would be a theorization of whether Wikipedia policies allow an editor to win a Nobel prize for their editing on the website. In other words can an editor edit in such a way, abiding by the policies of Wikipedia, that they win a Nobel prize for their editing? A Nobel in literature, peace? Or even any of these esteemed prizes such as a Turing? FacetsOfNonStickPans (talk) 16:50, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... There's a long article here that goes into how a group of Wikipedia articles are being manipulated. I don't know how accurate their assertions are, and haven't finished reading it, but it seems like it should have Signpost coverage. R. S. Shaw (talk) 04:46, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about...a study that recently showed Wikipedia articles are influencing judicial opinions. The study was led by a researcher at MIT, and that institutions column is "Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior".... (just say no to brain rot) NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:10, 6 August 2022 (UTC) NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:10, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... the fact that for nearly a decade, the toaster article claimed that the electric toaster was invented by 19th century Scottish inventor Alan MacMasters, who was completely fictious, with that claim and his article only being deleted last month. [1]. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alan MacMasters. The hoax has fooled numerous people, having been published in several newspaper articles as real. It's already received some coverage in Input Magazine. [2]. Hemiauchenia (talk) 00:55, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about Wikimedians of the year, if not already planned:
Congrats to the award recipients! ---Another Believer (Talk) 20:44, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about In age of misinformation, small group of NC residents keeps Wikipedia (mostly) correct.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:16, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
For WM news, Les sans pagEs (Women in Red initiative for French Wikipedia) is professionalizing czar 12:26, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Sidheeq Kappan. He is a Wikimedian (Mostly contributed to Malayalam Wikipedia - ml:User:Sidheeq) and a Journalist. Uttar Pradesh, India Police has slapped Sedition, Terrorism as well as UAPA charges against him and imprisoned waiting trail for 23 months for reporting 2020 Hathras gang rape and murder. He was granted bail by Supreme Court of India on 09-Sep-2022. Praveen:talk 02:05, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
I recently uploaded this meme:
I find it a bit hilarious and a bit thought provoking too. If anyone agrees, I'd like to suggest it as a next entry for the "Humour" section of the Signpost. Cheers! Sophivorus (talk) 21:58, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... kosboot (talk) 12:31, 12 September 2022 (UTC) For the In the Media section: Doxxed, threatened, and arrested: Russia’s war on Wikipedia editors. I didn't know that Russia has sued the WMF. - kosboot (talk) 12:31, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
The US DoJ names Wikipedia as being used by an the subject of an article to present a false picture of his net wealth. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:D_Pastor2014 for details and the DoJ press release Nthep (talk) 18:50, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
I would like The Signpost to mention this upcoming joint conference scheduled for 11-13 November, (the weekend of Veterans Day in the US, Rememberance Day in Canada). This will be a bilingual conference with translation of English presentations into Spanish & from Spanish into English.
WikiConference North America (Nov 11-13) will be held jointly with OpenStreetMap US's Mapping USA.
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Peaceray (talk) 23:51, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
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This might be worth a mention in the "in the media" section. -Indy beetle (talk) 06:37, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about...Perhaps the first example where our creation of a disambiguation page gets coverage in the news:
Matt Novak (October 20, 2022). "Wikipedia Tells Users To Be More Specific When Searching '2022 UK Government Crisis'". Gizmodo. agr (talk) 12:58, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about... DRAG RACE and its takeover in our world. Why? Because why not? — JuanGLP (talk) 14:52, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... [ https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/12-funny-bizarre-wikipedia-pages-231602766.html this] 2600:1011:B13B:392E:5D24:9D70:A7EA:F27 (talk) 03:40, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
jp×g 19:44, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... User:BeenAroundAWhile, One of (If not the) oldest confirmed wikipedians, who passed away this month. A memorial or an obituary of sorts, to preserve his memory. PerryPerryD Talk To Me 16:07, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has had an interesting effect on other Middle-earth articles, such as on characters in The Lord of the Rings:
Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:48, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
You might be interested in saying something about how the death of singer-songwriter Tom Springfield came to be reported, albeit belatedly. I've included my commentary at Talk:Tom Springfield#Death. Ghmyrtle (talk) 13:25, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... this TechCrunch piece regarding Arshdeep Singh (cricketer). Chris Troutman (talk) 18:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about "Wiki Dive" a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon type solo game/exercise/challenge where you start with the Featured Article of the Day (or a random article) and see how quickly you can reach submarine. It makes for some interesting thought exercises as you try to figure out a possible path to follow. (It was originally posted in the Antherwyck Games blog back in May, but I just saw it today.) Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 21:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
A few years ago I drastically expanded the Wikipedia article about the baseball player Stephen Vogt, working it up to GA status. This year, Stephen Vogt retired, which brought some additional attention to the page.
I mentioned on my personal Twitter page that I was the primary author of Vogt's Wikipedia page, which led to me getting contacted by Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and co-host of a baseball podcast called Effectively Wild. It turns out Ben had done a little research about the longest baseball player articles on Wikipedia, and he had been particularly intrigued by why the page about Stephen Vogt was as detailed as those of players like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.
So over the course of an hour-long conversation via Twitter DM messages, he started asking me questions about why I edited that page, how I went about it, what other pages I've edited, etc. He said he might discuss it on his podcast, and I figured he might give it a 30-second shoutout or something, but he ended up dedicated a full THIRTEEN MINUTES of his podcast to the discussion and to Stephen Vogt's Wikipedia page.
Not sure if this is something that would interest the Signpost, but if you want to listen, the Vogt/Wikipedia discussion can be found at the 17:40 mark of the podcast episode, which was just released today (October 7). The official episode description states: "Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley... share a few words from the diligent author of the retiring Stephen Vogt's exhausting exhaustive Wikipedia page." LOL
— Hunter Kahn 15:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
exhaustive Wikipedia page(emphasis mine) — which is a compliment, whereas the version you gave would not be. "Exhaustive" means "exhibiting all the facts or arguments; very thorough". It's a synonym for "complete" or "comprehensive". "Exhausting" means "producing exhaustion (extreme fatigue); having a debilitating effect". It's a synonym for "tiring". Veeeery different words! 😃 FeRDNYC (talk) 02:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
— Hunter Kahn 15:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
In the grab bag. {{done}} jp×g 09:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Russian disinformation on the Ukraine war gets noticed: [3] MER-C 18:14, 17 October 2022 (UTC) We covered the ISD paper, excellent. {{done}} jp×g 09:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign. That's looking like pretty big WMF x Community Relations news for this month, which should be included in any WMF roundup type articles. @Bluerasberry, Jayen466, and Kudpung:. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:05, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Covered. {{done}} jp×g 09:14, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... 172.56.12.38 (talk) 09:49, 30 November 2022 (UTC) The crew of let's encrypt they are taking over political and justice positions in the state something needs to be done about it muy pronto.
This might be worth a nod.
The Signpost should write about writer Emily St. John Mandel's effort to have her marital status updated on her own Wikipedia article, which it seems met with a bit of WP:BLP-fueled resistance... to the point where she took to Twitter and enlisted the assistance of Slate's Dan Kois, who ran "A Totally Normal Interview With Writer Emily St. John Mandel" for the sole purpose of generating a citable announcement of her divorce. Which worked.
...Our processes may be slightly broken. FeRDNYC (talk) 16:42, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
This article also states that last month's WMF banning of Arab and Persian admins had a theme: they were "Saudis acting under the influence of the Saudi government". cc @Jayen466. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about data analytics tools to analyze the list of articles created by a user (https://observablehq.com/collection/@pac02/pages-created).
I have already written a draft User:PAC2/What about the list of articles you've created. -- PAC2 (talk) 09:31, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
You might be interested in saying something about how the death of singer-songwriter Tom Springfield came to be reported, albeit belatedly. I've included my commentary at Talk:Tom Springfield#Death. Ghmyrtle (talk) 13:25, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... this TechCrunch piece regarding Arshdeep Singh (cricketer). Chris Troutman (talk) 18:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about "Wiki Dive" a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon type solo game/exercise/challenge where you start with the Featured Article of the Day (or a random article) and see how quickly you can reach submarine. It makes for some interesting thought exercises as you try to figure out a possible path to follow. (It was originally posted in the Antherwyck Games blog back in May, but I just saw it today.) Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 21:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
A few years ago I drastically expanded the Wikipedia article about the baseball player Stephen Vogt, working it up to GA status. This year, Stephen Vogt retired, which brought some additional attention to the page.
I mentioned on my personal Twitter page that I was the primary author of Vogt's Wikipedia page, which led to me getting contacted by Ben Lindbergh, senior editor at The Ringer and co-host of a baseball podcast called Effectively Wild. It turns out Ben had done a little research about the longest baseball player articles on Wikipedia, and he had been particularly intrigued by why the page about Stephen Vogt was as detailed as those of players like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.
So over the course of an hour-long conversation via Twitter DM messages, he started asking me questions about why I edited that page, how I went about it, what other pages I've edited, etc. He said he might discuss it on his podcast, and I figured he might give it a 30-second shoutout or something, but he ended up dedicated a full THIRTEEN MINUTES of his podcast to the discussion and to Stephen Vogt's Wikipedia page.
Not sure if this is something that would interest the Signpost, but if you want to listen, the Vogt/Wikipedia discussion can be found at the 17:40 mark of the podcast episode, which was just released today (October 7). The official episode description states: "Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley... share a few words from the diligent author of the retiring Stephen Vogt's exhausting exhaustive Wikipedia page." LOL
— Hunter Kahn 15:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
exhaustive Wikipedia page(emphasis mine) — which is a compliment, whereas the version you gave would not be. "Exhaustive" means "exhibiting all the facts or arguments; very thorough". It's a synonym for "complete" or "comprehensive". "Exhausting" means "producing exhaustion (extreme fatigue); having a debilitating effect". It's a synonym for "tiring". Veeeery different words! 😃 FeRDNYC (talk) 02:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
— Hunter Kahn 15:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
In the grab bag. {{done}} {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}jp×g 09:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Russian disinformation on the Ukraine war gets noticed: [4] MER-C 18:14, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
We covered the ISD paper, excellent. {{done}} {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}jp×g 09:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign. That's looking like pretty big WMF x Community Relations news for this month, which should be included in any WMF roundup type articles. @Bluerasberry, Jayen466, and Kudpung:. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:05, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Covered. {{done}} {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}jp×g 09:14, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... 172.56.12.38 (talk) 09:49, 30 November 2022 (UTC) The crew of let's encrypt they are taking over political and justice positions in the state something needs to be done about it muy pronto.
The Signpost should write about... Dumuzid (talk) 21:03, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Elon Musk has been something of a tear on his personal site Twitter, including, for instance this], and it seems (from my very subjective point of view) to be getting a lot of pickup. Just thought I would throw it out there! Thanks. Dumuzid (talk) 21:03, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
This might be worth a nod.
The Signpost should write about writer Emily St. John Mandel's effort to have her marital status updated on her own Wikipedia article, which it seems met with a bit of WP:BLP-fueled resistance... to the point where she took to Twitter and enlisted the assistance of Slate's Dan Kois, who ran "A Totally Normal Interview With Writer Emily St. John Mandel" for the sole purpose of generating a citable announcement of her divorce. Which worked.
...Our processes may be slightly broken. FeRDNYC (talk) 16:42, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
I've seen occasional mentions in the last week that Russian conscripts are being trained by simply handing them a copy of relevant Wikipedia articles. As much as I would defend the accuracy of Wikipedia content -- I know technology articles have been unofficially used inside Intel -- this is criminally negligent for any government to do. Anyway, I've discovered a NYT article that details this practice: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-failures-ukraine.html Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall, so I can't verify exactly what is actually written. Hoping someone else can have a look & use this for Signpost article. -- llywrch (talk) 20:44, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
You have probably noticed the adventures of Emily St. John Mandel, [5][6][7][8], just wanted to note that editors are talking about it at Talk:Emily St. John Mandel. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:17, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
Also at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red#Sourcing_marital_status and Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_living_persons#Resolving_conflicts_between_WP:BLPPRIMARY_&_WP:BLPEDIT/. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:57, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost could create its own mini-course or mini-capstone project within the Wikipedia Signpost namespace itself. Just text based, like normal Signpost articles. Here is one idea: On the software/coding/technical side of the encyclopedia. I am sure there are many non-technical editors who would want to know more about the technical side of this place and wouldn't know where to begin. FacetsOfNonStickPans (talk) 22:41, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
This article also states that last month's WMF banning of Arab and Persian admins had a theme: they were "Saudis acting under the influence of the Saudi government". cc @Jayen466. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about data analytics tools to analyze the list of articles created by a user (https://observablehq.com/collection/@pac02/pages-created).
I have already written a draft User:PAC2/What about the list of articles you've created. -- PAC2 (talk) 09:31, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about this article in Slate : "Should ChatGPT Be Used to Write Wikipedia Articles?" (https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/chatgpt-wikipedia-articles.html) PAC2 (talk) 09:31, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Wikipedia has a new look!
As of January 18, 2023, the default Wikipedia skin has been changed to Vector (2022). Early reaction on Wikipedia to the change was both positive and more loudly negative and somewhat nasty by some. Its rollout was perhaps not the smoothest. The change has already caught the attention of the media and organizations such as PCMag, TechCruch, Slate, and India Today. See user reaction on Wikipedia here, the Village pump, and Reddit. The Wikimedia Foundation is also collecting feedback using a Qualtrics form. — WILDSTARTALK 14:15, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
Less The Signpost should write about...
and more "has The Signpost written about..." Saw some journal articles linked in an old Twitter thread, and wondered if we've covered those studies already. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 09:13, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Another detector, GPTzero, was created by Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University, and was also used to test the same text. It reported that "Your text may include parts written by AI" and identified 12 sentences that were "more likely to be written by AI".
OpenAI and GPTzero's creator were both contacted for comments on this article at short notice, but neither have, as yet, replied. – J, S, B,
— Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/News and notes#Investigative challenge
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The Signpost should write about... a recently published piece of research entitled Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust Nick Moyes (talk) 00:46, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
This is just a rehas of the stuff Signpost covered before (Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-10-31/In the media) - back then as news, now it made it through the slow academic pipeline- based on a quick skim of the paper, it does cover quite a few events from after 2019, so this claim does not seem to be true.
Media coverage:[10] (press release from uni) and [11] Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:05, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about the new Wikipedia AI feature of DuckDuckGo (DDG), called "DuckAssist". If the user types in a query for which Wikipedia has relevant information, DuckAssist pops up at the top of DDG's search engine results page (SERP) with an Ask button. If you click on that, it presents an answer from Wikipedia right there on the SERP. — The Transhumanist 05:52, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about... The discussion around User:Bradv and User:Jimbo Wales at User talk:Bradv. The discussion centers around an allegation by Jimbo that Bradv is an undisclosed paid editor, and the community response defending Bradv.
QuicoleJR (talk) 16:25, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
{{done}}
The Signpost should write about...
Probably behind a paywall, but I see it b/c I have a subscription. This is an analysis of Google's Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4) data set[C4 1] From the article:
Wikipedia to Wowhead ... The three biggest sites were patents.google.com No. 1, which contains text from patents issued around the world; wikipedia.org No. 2, the free online encyclopedia; and scribd.com No. 3, a subscription-only digital library.
The websites in Google’s C4 datasettable
Many websites have separate domains for their mobile versions (i.e., “en.m.wikipedia.org” and “en.wikipedia.org”). We treated these as the same domain. We also combined subdomains aimed at specific languages, so “en.wikipedia.org” became “wikipedia.org.”So only enwiki seems to be in the dataset.
... the training data for OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, began with as much as 40 times the amount of web scraped data in C4. GPT-3’s training data also includes all of English language Wikipedia, ...
Peaceray (talk) 15:33, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
{{done}}
---Another Believer (Talk) 18:59, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
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The headline of this article on the website of Vice is more sensational than warranted, but I guess it deserves a mention in "In the news". --Lambiam 11:37, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about... the role Wikipedia might have played (ironically) in NPR's decision to quit Twitter. As reported by Gizmodo, Business Insider and even the network itself, Elon Musk told reporter Bobby Allyn that he relied on this specific category to determine which accounts should be deemed as "state-affiliated" or "government-funded". As a result, someone even decided to add a clarification to the aforementioned page. Unfortunately, I guess NPR's reputation wasn't the only one at risk of serious damage here...
@Smallbones and Jayen466: It's very likely that you were already writing on this, but I still wanted to report it, hopefully it's useful. Oltrepier (talk) 16:53, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
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I was going to just post an update here, but I don't know how much traffic this page gets, so updating the date/position, too. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 12:09, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
I posted the below back in March. By the time the next issue comes out, the show will be over, but it may be a good time for a post-event mention. Maybe it's because I'm active uploading photos on Commons, but IMO it seems like a big deal for someone in our community to have their original wiki-contributions featured in a gallery/museum. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 12:09, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Hey Signpost. I've learned of what may be the first museum exhibit of a Wikimedian's contributions to the project. Frank Schulenburg has a photo exhibition going on through 5/14 at the Museum of Northern California Art, featuring prints of his photos that document northern California on Commons. There's information (including the photos themselves and documentation of the exhibit being set up) on this page on Commons: commons:User:Frank Schulenburg/Northern California on Wikipedia. Seems like something the Signpost may want to cover. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:00, 26 March 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about...
India communicates with WMF: Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard#Communications_from_government_of_India_to_Wikimedia_Foundation_regarding_content_about_maps_depicting_the_borders_of_India. May be worth a mention. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:52, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
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xkcd has mentioned Wikipedia again. Don't forget to mouse hover (tooltip) over the cartoon. I don't know if there are yet enough mentions of Wikipedia at xkcd to warrant a list at Wikipedia. Philh-591 (talk) 20:48, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost should write about...
Wikimedia Foundation files lawsuits against Russian Prosecutor General's Office, Roskomnadzor over blocking Wikipedia information. It is likely the follow-up action of Moscow Court rejected case in November 2022. --SCP-2000 03:27, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
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The Signpost could include information on a planned user study involving an AI browser extension named “ConvoWizard” that aims to inform users when a conversation is getting tense. The group is looking for participants, and are open to feedback at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)#Cornell_team_seeking_feedback_on_a_planned_user_study Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 01:46, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
Draft suggestion: "A Cornell research group is now recruiting volunteers for a user study involving a prototype tool to help Wikipedians have healthier discussions on Talk pages, noticeboards, and other discussion spaces. You can learn more about the project at its meta-wiki project page or by checking out the discussion on Village Pump. Wikipedians who are interested in participation should sign up here: (link)" Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 01:15, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
{{done}}
The Signpost should write about the consequences of COVID pandemic in Wikipedias, especially in the activity of many Wikipedias of the developing world. In the developing world, the years until 2020 were met with continuous and uninterrupted growth in users and activity. However, after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, the brief further growth due to the first lockdown has been followed from a, for many Wikipedias, prolonged decrease in active users and activity.
Here are some examples:
I suggest that you should write an article for this decrease of activity in many Wikipedias of the developing world. This decrease has been mixed with stagnation or decrease in pageviews as well, as you can see from the Wikistats site. These decreases wouldn't have happened if Covid pandemic wasn't disrupting the growth cycle of various Wikipedias of the developing world. You can check, in Wikiscan, in the Calendar unit (checking Stats and after the name of year, which is given as e.g. 22 for 2022), the growth and decrease of annual new article production pre and post-2020.
I think that you must compile a such article, with interviews from Wikipedias of India, Africa and Asia giving their opinions for the decrease and what could be done to finally end it. After the publication of that article, if you judge that it would be on the benefit of the Signpost, I would suggest to publish an op-ed as well, showing an estimation of how Wikipedia's activity could be now if Covid was just a mere fiction. NikosLikomitros (talk) 21:36, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about...the passing of Peter Eckersley. He was a prominent figure in digital rights advocacy at EFF, as well as an early contributor to Wikipedia as User:Pde, editing up through last year. I found out about his involvement in Wikipedia from this Twitter thread. Legoktm (talk) 23:12, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... User:BD2412 becomes the fourth Wikipedian to surpass two million edits. It's here now, but should be official here tomorrow. Moving Wheeler Martin from draft to mainspace was the edit that hit the magic number. I kind of feel like Forrest Gump in that scene after he has been running back and forth across America for three years, and suddenly stops and says, "I'm pretty tired, I think I'll go home now". Cheers! BD2412 T 07:09, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... the View it! tool. A new tool for discoverability of images on Commons in development utilizing Structured Data on Commons. I would be happy to write/help write the article, if others are interested. JamieF (talk) 19:19, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Wikipedia’s Citations Are Influencing Scholars and Publishers an interesting opinion piece with references Project Osprey (talk) 22:04, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
The what-to-do-about-twitter-blue discussion Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Twitter_Blue_and_verified_Twitter_accounts may be worth a mention. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:09, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... University of Kansas archaeologist John Hoopes' praise for Wikipedia's articles in that area at the end of a recent interview in Slate Daniel Case (talk) 07:30, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... for "In the Media" https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/11/01/guest-post-wikipedias-citations-are-influencing-scholars-and-publishers Wikipedia’s Citations Are Influencing Scholars and Publishers By Rachel Helps kosboot (talk) 13:23, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about the Wednesday index (https://mastodon.world/@OpenSexism/109315053114410894). OpenSexism measures gender diversity in 26 Wikipedia articles each week. This has created a nice dataset which helps measuring the evolution of gender diversity over time. Here is the article: https://medium.com/@OpenSexism/the-wednesday-index-one-year-of-gender-diversity-data-visualized-a6458b94d52b
This is related to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-05-29/In focus. PAC2 (talk) 14:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
The template 'Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost article link for WikiProjects' has been used rather consistently. Is there any mechanism to add relevant The Signpost articles to the talk pages of articles in the mainspace? There is a template already used for coverage which has been used around 4.5k times; can this template be used? For example, from this issue (v19i1), if I wanted to link the Technology Report to the corresponding Wikipedia article talk page how should I do it, the press template or some other way? Can I duplicate this process to other cases? FacetsOfNonStickPans (talk) 19:49, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... The state of paid editing. This comes up on Signpost briefly every 6 months or so, but it is only getting worse. Wikipedia as a trusted worldwide information source has become the target of an enormous promotional Wikiwashing industry with the advertising budgets of huge corporations behind it. No one is even shy about paid editing anymore; I see ads for WikiFederation, WikiProficiency, WizardsOfWiki, WikiCurators (retch), The Mather Group, WhiteHatWiki all the time. I would like to see a comprehensive history of the problem, including a history of RfCs of proposals for dealing with COI editing.
I have been an editor for 16 years and I feel this is the main threat to Wikipedia. We will lose our main asset, our editors, if they realize their unpaid hard work upgrading articles with the truth will simply be reverted by boiler rooms of paid flacks at ad agencies editing anonymously. Corporations' excuse is they need to do COI editing to correct wrong or out of date information in their articles, but that's inverting causality: any actual errors in these articles are because few independent editors want to work on articles where there is a 900 pound gorilla in the room. What unbiased editor would waste their time editing corporate and business articles today? How corrupted are our articles on corporations? I would like to see the opinions of veteran editors and WMF on this, and what to do about it. --ChetvornoTALK 20:25, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... two more press features for the project, this time courtesy of Il Post and The Atlantic!
The first article was published by Italian on-line newspaper Il Post - they have already written about Wikipedia in several instances - on January 2, 2023. The piece broke down the ongoing debate on the tone of the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising banners that are usually hosted on the site at the end of each year: in the process, previous articles by Slate and The Washington Post on the same matter, as well as the WMF's official statements on Wikimedia 2030 and donations, were quoted as sources. If needed, I can help you translate the article to English.
On the other hand, just today (January 22), American magazine The Atlantic has published an article about the platform's approach to controversies and "edit wars", as well as its commitment to fact-checking through secondary sources. Most notably, the author has presented the very long discussion involving Gloria Hemingway as the starting point of his piece.
I don't know how interesting these news could sound like, realistically, but I hope it will still be an useful suggestion! Oltrepier (talk) 15:23, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... the recent restrictions to Wikipedia imposed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, a Government-owned agency that regulates telecommunication services in the country. Last Wednesday, the PTA seemingly blocked the platform in almost every area across the nation, in an attempt to push admins to remove some allegedly "blasphemous" (albeit unspecified) content from the site.
Not exactly a good omen, especially thinking about your report on Saudi Arabia from last month...
Oltrepier (talk) 17:44, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about WP:Songs about Wikipedia/The RfA Candidate's Song. Funniest thing ever. EEng 19:27, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258. February marks 765 years to the day of the finalization of the destruction of knowledge accumulated for centuries, during that grotesque event of murderous and brutal conquest. I couldn't help but to express my feelings in the page's talk. In memoriam. Thinker78 (talk) 00:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about Wikipedia's tropical cyclone and weather projects changing their generic colour scheme which is used on the trackmaps, infoboxes and throughout the project. Its been a long slog and a lot of teeth-pulling but we seem to have finally managed to find a colour scheme that works, complies with Wikipedia's policies and a number of people are happy with, however, a number of people on and off wiki do not like the colour scheme changing. As a result, @Hurricanehink: has designed a press release to try and highlight what process the project has been through etc and I would strongly suggest that the Signpost covers this issue.Jason Rees (talk) 19:55, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
New Wikimedia Brand Report (about ten countries). For example, it showed that “80% of global internet users have heard of Wikipedia”, more than Britannica or Reddit, but less than Google or YouTube. Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons awareness - less than 20%. Not very good results for South Korea (Wikipedia awareness only 40%; 60% detractors; negative Net Promoter Score) and for young users (18-24). Also Free Knowledge Movement is not very popular. https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/brand-stewardship/brand-health/ Tyiohko (talk) 21:21, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I recently noticed an interesting phenomenon when observing the Chinese Wikipedia, the vast majority of Chinese Wikipedia editors are relatively young, Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Demographics tells us that 28% of users are older than 40, but it seems that the Chinese Wikipedia does not follow. I think this might be worth a writeup, right? ときさき くるみ not because they are easy, but because they are hard 18:22, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Wikimania 2023, to be held on 16–19 August 2023 in Singapore, program submission is now opened (since 28 February 2023, 16:00 UTC). It will be opened until 28 March 2023, 23:59 AoE. There are 11 tracks to submit your proposal to: Community initiatives; Education; Equity, inclusion, and community health; ESEAP (East, South East Asia, and the Pacific) region; GLAM, heritage, and culture; Governance; Legal, advocacy, and risk; Open data; Research, science, and medicine; Technology; Wild ideas. Diff post: Be part of the Wikimania 2023 program!; Track details, submission questions on Wikimania wiki. – robertsky (talk) 03:26, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... "The Living Law of Wikipedia", a lecture by David Nelken of The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, delivered at Singapore Symposium in Legal Theory 2023. YouTube video. Compares Wikipedia's WP:PAGs to legal systems. Levivich (talk) 19:24, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
Maybe the Signpost could investigate anonymous IP's repeatedly adding short gibberish sections to the end of many article talk pages, which has been going on for months now. See the history of Talk:Tap code for one semi-random example. Or does anyone know if this has been discussed elsewhere, and any conclusions reached? Thanks. AnonMoos (talk) 22:53, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about... Sam Denby's Half as Interesting video on ArbCom Jayron32 15:40, 12 April 2023 (UTC)