[Foundation-l] Announcing new "Signpost" issues on this list - Wikimedia-l

3 Aug 2010

Hi all,

some of you might know the "Signpost", a community-written and
community-edited newspaper, based on the English Wikipedia and
covering stories, events and reports related to Wikipedia, its sister
projects and the Wikimedia Foundation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/About

The first issue came out on January 10, 2005 and it has been appearing
(more or less) weekly ever since then, with a new issue due every
Monday.

While coverage of events on the English Wikipedia forms an important
part of the "Signpost", our "News and notes", "In the news"
and
"Technology Report" sections regularly contain many news items that
are relevant for other Wikipedias, or all Foundation projects. In June
(around the time when Sage Ross left as editor-in-chief to take up his
current job at the WMF, and I stepped into the breach), we had a lot
of discussions about new ideas for the Signpost, including proposals
to provide translations of our Foundation-wide coverage, or even
moving it to Meta. While this still seemed a bit ambitious, there was
consensus to emphasize our interwiki coverage more, and it was
subsequently renamed from "Wikipedia Signpost" to "Signpost".
[Commercial break: If you are an experienced member of a WMF
project/community and would like to contribute to one of our "Sister
project" stories, covering its history, characteristics and recent
major events, contact us at this email address or at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POST/TIPS .] And at Wikimania last
month, I talked to a lot of Wikimedians who are not primarily active
on the English Wikipedia, but nevertheless know, read and appreciate
the Signpost.

On the other hand, there is currently no other independent publication
(at least not in English) which regularly covers or summarizes
WMF-related news. Wikizine was very informative and even had several
translated editions, but has been inactive since the beginning of this
year. Wikipedia Weekly was a well-informed podcast disussing much
Foundation news, but there hasn't been a new episode since October
2009. Veterans might recall the Wikimedia Quarto, which had some
excellent content and was widely translated, but stopped after three
issues in 2004/2005. Of course there are other things which are useful
for staying up to date, like the blog planets or Phoebe's earlier list
summaries for this list, but they don't replace journalism-style news
reporting.

Following a suggestion by Phoebe, I am going to try out sending
announcements of new Signpost issues to this list, containing brief
headline summaries and links (see accompanying posting for the current
issue). We hope that this will provide valuable and on-topic
information for people interested in the kind of topics that are being
discussed here, and perhaps it could also help to get more people
involved in providing reader-oriented coverage of news from WMF
projects to the whole Wikimedia community.

Regards, HaeB

-- 
Wikipedia Signpost Staff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost