Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-01-15/Opinion
- Twenty years ago on January 10, 2005, Michael Snow published the first issue of The Signpost. In the very first article From the editor he very clearly set out the goals of his creation. It was to be a newspaper, serving the Wikipedia community broadly defined, and authors would sign their posts. That article is our founding document. We've added a couple of amendments, but you can still call it our constitution. Thank you, Michael. -S
It's good to be back
Hello! A bit of re-introduction might be necessary - I created the Signpost back in 2005, and while I haven't written for it in many years, I continue to follow its progress. I look forward to each new issue that comes out, and it instills great pride that the idea has proven valuable enough to carry on for so long. It was and clearly still is a lot of work to bring together - many people might not realize that I lasted barely 7 months generating the bulk of the content before effectively burning out. There was a smattering of help early on, but fortunately my Signpost wikibreak prompted even more people to step up. When I returned, it was good to be able to focus more on writing and reporting, while letting others handle editing, publishing, and building out the newsroom. It definitely requires a team effort, and I appreciate the current team inviting me to share this perspective.
From the beginning, the Signpost was intended as a serious endeavor while still integrating a sense of humor and not taking anything as the final word. I am grateful to all who have participated since then for keeping it going in that spirit. I'm also glad to have seen how thoroughly people adopted and extended the concept of a wiki-newspaper, to the point of even having a comics section for a while. Probably like Wikipedia itself, I don't know that the Signpost will ever contain all that it might simultaneously, but it has made itself a fixture in the community nevertheless.
I value the independence of the Signpost as well, which is an interesting challenge given the publication is part of the project that it covers. To that end, the culture and ethic of NPOV is an invaluable base. I think it's good to always be asking ourselves what readers want to know about, and how to cover conflicts without inflaming them. There are further interesting dynamics when it comes to the Wikimedia Foundation, especially given that so many Signpost contributors - among them myself, Phoebe, Tilman, Sam, Jan, Rosie, Pete, Sage - were eventually employed by the Foundation or served on the Board of Trustees (whether our Signpost efforts came before, after, or even both). The right balance is mostly to be found in remembering that everyone wishes for the success of the project overall, in covering both good news and bad fairly, and in sticking to factual data rather than letting personalities and gossip take over. In the more general sense, the Signpost has always been ready to cover conflict of interest issues like paid editing, from the earliest days to more recently.
Making sense of it all
Some things certainly have changed from 20 years ago. It is amazing to think that one of the world's most popular websites could have been serving its content across the globe with an internet connection limited to a maximum speed of 100Mbps - today the plan I have from my home internet provider, as an individual consumer, is faster. Meanwhile, the media are no longer routinely amazed at how Wikipedia articles materialize so quickly in response to current events, as they were back then with the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, for example. Instead, they have simply come to rely on it (cautiously, one hopes) as an essential piece of the news ecosystem, a piece with more stability in its own way than other parts such as Twitter/X, given that it is less subject to the whims of Elon Musk and his minions. (Wikipedia manages equally to resist the whims of Stephen Colbert.) When the Signpost started, people were diligently tracking every media mention of Wikipedia with tools like Google News alerts, because the attention still seemed a bit new to us. Attaching context and significance to our understanding of this media coverage is a valuable service I believe the Signpost has provided throughout its run.
Things that did not exist when the Signpost started: checkusers, the BLP policy (the Seigenthaler hoax article had not yet been created, let alone publicized by its subject), a unified login for all Wikimedia projects, monkey selfies, Wikidata. The first Wikimania conference had not yet been held.
We have been through power outages, site blackouts, and DDoS attacks, and the Signpost has reported on all of them. We have seen regimes around the world variously try to block, censor, or fork Wikipedia. And once in a while, in places where the rule of law still holds some sway, the courts have ultimately seen the error in trying to suppress free knowledge.
Sometimes these events deprive billions of people of access to Wikipedia, and occasionally carrying on for years. Yet it might seem that such things draw less interest from our readers than official interventions by the Wikimedia Foundation involving no more than a single article at a time. I point that out not to criticize anyone's sense of proportion, but to acknowledge that as a movement, we aspire to the highest standards, be that in ethics, factual accuracy, or freedom. I hope the Signpost will long continue as part of striving to meet those standards, and also holding ourselves to them.
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