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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
