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The staff who run the platform say they want a stronger voice in their workplace, better job protections and an end to common practices that make life "precarious for everyday workers" according to Jeremy Bernick, one of the union organizers.
WWU demanded a response from the WMF by July 24, i.e. before the end of the Wikimania conference. According to Law360, which also covered the recognition demand, the union is organizing with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and aims to represent about 235 U.S. employees.
A press release from CWA said recent events at the Wikimedia Foundation had led to drastically increased concerns regarding transparency, trust, the organization's future, and leadership's commitment to the free knowledge movement.
Union organizer Jeremy Bernick told KQED that the union represented WMF employees' third and so far most advanced attempt at unionizing, highlighting the Trump administration's attacks on public media, the cost of living crisis and concerns about artificial intelligence as some of the factors driving more staff toward unionization. WWU-UK, the UK branch of Wiki Workers United, sought voluntary recognition from the Foundation in June (see press release).
As 404 Media's Jason Koebler reported on July 27, the WMF declined to recognize Wiki Workers United U.S., waiting until after the end of the Wikimania conference to make its decision public. For further developments, see this issue's News and notes. – AK
Discussion of the many Wikipedia contributions of User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao, aka Steven Pruitt, begins and ends an in-depth article in the The New Yorker (not paywalled yet, except at archive.org). While Pruitt is interviewed, the charm of the article is his straight-forward modesty, as well as similar realistic commentary by other Wikipedians, including Justin Knapp (whose record as most active Wikipedian was overtaken by Pruitt), Jimmy Wales, and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. Going a step further the article gets into detail on AI and some of the recent challenges faced by Wikipedia. But the focus is, as it should be, on the Wikipedians. this could be extended very easily - but I don't have the time right now – S
Subtitle: Wikipedia doesn't have enough cryptocurrency articles because of its stringent notability policies, says deprecated cryptocurrency media company CoinDesk[1]
Editors feel unsafe, receive "condescending" and "exclusionary" treatment: Aaron Bandler reports for the Jerusalem News Syndicate on another study by Israeli academic Shlomit Aharoni Lir.
Guess the real fake article: Buzzfeed has a quiz that lists 20 triplets of purported Wikipedia articles, two of which are actual articles with one being a fake. Presumably, this means current articles. This reporter could only find 10 of the fakes, even though I could easily identify 16 of the real articles. Just unlucky, I guess! Let us know how you scored in the comments section. Probability professors are also invited to give the expected number of correct guesses as a function of the number of current articles known to be real, given complete ignorance of the fake articles, a random distribution of the known articles, etc. S
This is wildly curious: Seattle isn't soley Starbucks and software; also pseudoscience: Discovery Institute blogger, summarizing The Federalist critique of the siteban received by Larry Sanger (see last issue), finds people still reading Wikipedia "beyond curious" and "a wildly Woke [sic] example of what can go wrong in an information society" [2]
Battling health disinformation: The Genetic Literacy Project features an interview with Dr. Netha Hussain, who "has been part of the last line of defense against public health disinformation on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia".
Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
Images and Galleries
Sidebar images
To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):
I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
A caption
Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link):
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2|1 = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
|caption = A caption
|fullwidth = no
}}
gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like.
If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes.
Two-column vs full width styles
If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything.
However, every time you have a |fullwidth=no and change it to |fullwidth=yes (or vice-versa), the article will take that style from that point onwards (|fullwidth=yes → full width, |fullwidth=no → two-column). By default, omitting |fullwidth= is the same as putting |fullwidth=no and the article will have two columns after that. Again, this is perfectly fine in most cases, and you don't need to do anything.
However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article.
To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert
will create the sidebar on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. A partial list of valid |tag= parameters can be found at here and will decide the list of articles presented. |seriestitle= is the title that will appear below 'Related articles' in the box.
For more Signpost coverage on the visual editor see our visual editorseries.
If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet.
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