Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-12-24/In the media
 Article display preview: | This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!
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Consider the humble fork
Forks are everywhere. If you've got a barn or a stable, there should be a fork inside it to clean out the muck. There are forks in the road, on the internet, on the chess board, in beards and tongues, in cryptocurrencies, and almost everybody has forks in their drawers. Maybe we should use chopsticks instead.
Have you gotten $2.75 worth of info from Wikipedia? Consider donating
The Ledger's headline (paywalled) gives the main news: the Florida newspaper is asking for funds from its readers to support Wikipedia. But the bad news is that The Ledger needs to charge its readers to pay its bills. Otherwise, their readers will get cut off by the paywall. The good news is that they will give you "unlimited digital access (costing) $1 for the first 6 months". Everybody, it seems, needs a little green to support their publishing. The better news is that Wikipedia is still free for all readers and has no plans to change that. This reporter has no objections to you donating $2.75 or $25.00 or whatever amount you would prefer. It is not that the Wikimedia Foundation needs your cash now to forestall closing down this website next week, next month, or even next year, but it is just good planning for a non-profit organization to build a solid base of small donors who can ensure that this site will be around for a long time to come. The best news is that The Signpost will always be free – just as we have for almost 19 years – so long as Wikipedia keeps publishing. And to return the plug, Signpost readers should feel free to consider paying a dollar for six months of The Ledger. – S
When you come to a fork in the highway ...
Forked again?
The author of an article in Quillette raises some pointed objections to the way the Wikipedia community handles disputes over coverage of contentious material, including "cognitive distortions" that are perpetuated "by reducing the population of people who raise [objections]... As these users have either quit Wikipedia or been permanently blocked from editing". They conclude that Justapedia is necessary this way: "[T]he need for such a competitor [to Wikipedia] is stronger now than it has been in past years, due to several recent controversies revolving around the manipulation and/or politicization of Wikipedia, along with a widespread perception that Wikipedia has not done enough to prevent this type of problem." The founder of Justapedia wrote a 2020 op-ed in this publication with some of the same concerns. – B
In brief
- Congressional staffers rely on Wikipedia...: The good news, according to a former staffer writing in Scientific American blogs, with amplification and analysis in The Hill, is that the U.S. Congress leans on Wikipedia to get smart fast on science crises, "from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, or the 2016 flooding of social media platforms by disinformation". The bad news is, they can't go deeper because they have gutted their own research arms and don't have staff with the requisite knowledge. [1]
- ...and Wikipedia relies on staff whose pay scales may lag sector: "The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages", Business Insider
- Why is this night ... er, year, different from all other years?: Cricket, obviously: "no other cricket-centric topics have appeared on the site's [that's us] year-end most popular articles lists since they began doing the calculations in 2015." -- Deseret News [2] Year-end roundup of pageviews was also covered by the Associated Press, Fox Business, CNN, and others.
- Hey, look ma, I made it... on Wikipedia!: Back in October, Valeria Costa reported in Domani (in Italian) about how French physicist Pierre Agostini had gained a Wikipedia article – user Uhooep created it first on en.wiki – only after being jointly awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Anne L'Huillier and Ferenc Krausz. As noted by Costa, Agostini was not the first Nobel-winning figure who received the "WP:GNG treatment" upon his prestigious achievement, since Donna Strickland had been granted an article back in 2018 (mistakenly reported as 2020).
- The disrespect is real: In her review of the Hulu-exclusive TV series The Great, as part of the "Best Shows That Ended in 2023", The New York Times journalist and television critic Margaret Lyons humorously said that, "So many period dramas just feel like inert, expensive Wikipedia entries, but The Great, through its irreverence and artistry, was alive at every turn."
- No, Internet doesn't count...: In a November interview for El País (in Spanish), Spanish poet, musician and film director Antón Reixa revealed that, back in 2011, he had shown his own Wikipedia article to the civil registration officer in an attempt to prove his identity and will to change his full name; however, the clerk shrugged it off, stating that "Internet [didn't] count".
- 100 Books (and one Wiki): Back in November, Italian journalist and literary critic Marino Sinibaldi shed a light on the Wikipedia article for the Bokklubben World Library — published by the Norwegian Book Club in 2002 — during the 100th episode of Il Post-exclusive podcast Timbuctu, which was centered around famous lists of the most memorable books. Sinibaldi also cited Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century list and the BBC's The Big Read, among other examples.
- Wishing for a more accessible Internet: On 3 December, which marked the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Nicolas Six reported in Le Monde (in French, partially behind pay-wall) that more than one million people with several grades of visual impairment in France still struggle to surf on the Internet due to their condition. One of the interviewees, a 75-year-old woman, said that "despite taking weekly IT lessons, [she] can't even go on Wikipedia". If you want to know how to improve accessibility to our platform for all readers, then the Dos and don'ts list and the project pages for WikiProject Accessibility (which is also active on French Wikipedia) and WikiProject Usability should be good places to start from.
- Jimbo says no to crypto: Benzinga, CoinTelegraph,
- Fake work on Wikipedia, or work about a fake Wikipedia?: author Ben Lerner from last month's disinformation report was interviewed by Here and Now (WBUR-FM, Boston) [3]
- Subtitle: Text text text.
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
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To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):  I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing (link) will instead create an inline image like below  The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
To create a gallery, use the following Each line inside the tags should be formatted like
If you want it centered, remove t |
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Quotes
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To insert a framed quote like the one on the right, use this template (link): If writing a 'full width' article, change
To insert a pull quote like
use this template (link):
To insert a long inline quote like
use this template (link): |
Side frames
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Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like.
A caption
For example, to insert the {{Graph:Chart}} generated by in a frame, simple put the graph code in to get the framed Graph:Chart on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |
Two-column vs full width styles
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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 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 where you want the switch to happen. To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. |
Links and such
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By the way, the template that you're reading right now is {{Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue}} (edit). A list of the preload templates for Signpost articles can be found here. |
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