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The Signpost

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The Signpost
Cover of The Signpost (February 24, 2016)
TypeWeekly newspaper
FormatOnline
Owner(s)Wikipedia community
Founder(s)Michael Snow
PublisherEnglish Wikipedia
EditorGamaliel and Go Phightins!
LaunchedJanuary 10, 2005
LanguageEnglish
CountryUnited States
WebsiteOfficial website
Free online archivesFree online archives

The Signpost (previously known as The Wikipedia Signpost[1]) is the English Wikipedia’s free internal newsletter.[2][3][4] It is managed by the Wikipedia community and is published online, usually weekly.[2][5] Each edition contains stories and articles related to the Wikipedia community.[6][7] Contributions to the newsletter are made by a wide range of editors.[2]

Newsletter

The publication was launched in January 2005 under the original name The Wikipedia Signpost and was later renamed simply to The Signpost.[8][2][1] It was founded by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator and later Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.[1][9] In 2010, sister internal Wikipedia publications managed by volunteer contributors to the website included the podcast The Wikipedia Weekly and newsletter The Wikizine.[10][11]

The Signpost publishes stories related to the Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia Foundation, and other Wikipedia-related projects.[2][12][13] The newsletter helps to notify Wikipedia editors about ongoing collaborative projects to improve articles on the site together.[14] The publication is a routine location for centralized notices on recently published academic studies about Wikipedia.[8] The Signpost includes a section called the "Arbitration Report", formerly "The Report on Lengthy Litigation", which details proceedings from Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee.[15]

Readers may choose to receive the newsletter by email or to receive notices of new issues at their user "Talk" page; a third option is to have the latest issue's table of contents displayed on their user page.[16] All the archives are available to read which is a fast way to learn about the history of Wikipedia.[2]

Scholarly analysis

A 2009 article in the peer-reviewed academic journal Sociological Forum characterized The Signpost as an example of a subcommunity within the larger Wikipedia community.[17] The same year, the social movements journal Interface evidenced The Signpost among the "complexity and richness of those organizations" that make up the social strata of mannerisms in which individuals may volunteer their time to the website.[18]

Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Dartmouth College relied upon archives from The Signpost to track Wikipedia editing outages, and presented their findings at the 2011 IEEEIWIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence.[19] In a study of Wikipedia and its reputation in higher education published in 2013 in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship, researcher Gemma Bayliss regularly reviewed the Twitter feed of The Signpost located with handle @wikisignpost, in order to be certain her scholarship on the website was current.[20]

Reception

The New York Times in 2007 called The Signpost a "mocked-up newspaper" and classed this among evidence that Wikipedia exhibited a retro style and "its own special brand of kitsch".[21] 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 weekly internal newsletter, the Wikipedia Signpost."[16]

The Register's executive editor Andrew Orlowski in a 2016 article described The Signpost as "Wikipedia's own plucky newsletter."[22] Writing about a 2016 incident at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which supports Wikipedia, the editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge, referred to The Signpost and directed her more technically minded readers to its pages "to better understand what was being planned."[23] Torsten Kleinz, writing for German tech portal Heise Online in an article about the same event, similarly said, "When official communications ground to a halt, the Signpost community newsletter jumped into the breach, brought unknown facts to light and initiated an informed discussion."[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Cohen, Noam (March 5, 2007). "A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. p. C5. Retrieved February 29, 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Phoebe Ayers; Charles Matthews; Ben Yates (2008). How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it. No Starch Press. pp. 345–. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
  3. ^ Koebler, Jason (February 16, 2016). "The Secret Search Engine Tearing Wikipedia Apart". Vice.
  4. ^ Geoffroy, Romain (January 16, 2014). "Une employée de Wikipédia débarquée pour avoir monnayé ses articles". Les Inrockuptibles.
  5. ^ Dobusch, Leonhard (January 12, 2014). "Interview mit Dirk Franke über „Grenzen der Bezahlung" in der Wikipedia". Netzpolitik.org.
  6. ^ Rosen, Rebecca (February 6, 2013). "If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing at the Super Bowl Half-Time Show". The Atlantic. Retrieved February 21, 2016.
  7. ^ Dariusz Jemielniak (2014). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press. pp. 231–. ISBN 978-0804797238.
  8. ^ a b 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. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  9. ^ McCarthy, Caroline (July 18, 2008). "Wikimedia Foundation edits its board of trustees". CNET.
  10. ^ Chen, Shun-Lin (April 30, 2010). "Wikipedia: A Republic of Science Democratized". Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology. 20 (2). ISSN 1059-4280. OCLC 23860428. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  11. ^ Reagle, Joseph Michael (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press. pp. 9, 178. ISBN 978-0262014472.
  12. ^ Sotirios Paroutis; Loizos Heracleous; Duncan Angwin (1 February 2013). Practicing Strategy: Text and Cases. SAGE Publications. pp. 237–. ISBN 978-1-4462-9047-7.
  13. ^ Waters, John K. (2010). The Everything Guide to Social Media. Adams Media. pp. 180, 270. ISBN 978-1440506314.
  14. ^ Brooks, David (January 16, 2011). "More than a dozen people help out with Telegraph's Wikipedia project". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on March 27, 2015. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  15. ^ Oz, Ayelet (September 1, 2014). "The Legal Consciousness of Wikipedia". SSRN. Harvard Law School. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2572381. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  16. ^ a b John Broughton (25 January 2008). Wikipedia: The Missing Manual: The Missing Manual. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". pp. 454–. ISBN 978-0-596-55377-7.
  17. ^ Konieczny, Piotr (March 2009). "Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia". Sociological Forum. 24 (1). Wiley: 167. Retrieved February 29, 2016 – via JSTOR. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |subscription= ignored (|url-access= suggested) (help)
  18. ^ Konieczny, Piotr. "Wikipedia: community or social movement?" (PDF). Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements. 1 (2): 212–232. ISSN 2009-2431. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 7, 2012. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  19. ^ Yan, Guanhua; Arackaparambil, Chrisil. "Wiki-watchdog: Anomaly detection in Wikipedia through a distributional lens". Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 01. IEEE Computer Society Washington. pp. 257–264. doi:10.1109/WI-IAT.2011.86. ISBN 978-0-7695-4513-4. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  20. ^ 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. ISSN 1361-4533. Retrieved March 1, 2016 – via EBSCO Host.
  21. ^ Dee, Jonathan (July 1, 2007). "All the News That's Fit to Print Out". The New York Times. Retrieved February 29, 2016.
  22. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (January 12, 2016). "Wikimedia Foundation bins community-elected trustee". The Register.
  23. ^ McCambridge, Ruth (February 16, 2016). "Knight Foundation Grant Request Tears at Wikipedia's Community". Nonprofit Quarterly.
  24. ^ Kleinz, Torsten (February 27, 2016). "Kommentar: Wie geht es weiter mit der Wikimedia Foundation?". Heise Online.

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedia Signpost.
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