From the editors
Ways for beginners to support The Signpost community journalism
The Signpost is a community newspaper written by Wikipedia editors for Wikipedia editors, chronicling updates from within and outside the Wikimedia movement. Our cadence, depth, and breadth are pretty much dependent on your submissions and suggestions, among other internal processes. The Signpost's content structure covers everything from updates within the movement to outside of the movement, from compilation of research on Wikimedia movement to jokes and crossword puzzles, as well as allowances for commentaries and opinions. Want to contribute to The Signpost? Here are some ideas.
- 10–30 minutes
- Contribute to "in the media". Every issue of The Signpost summarizes recent journalism about Wikipedia. Search for news through your favorite search process. There are 10-20 articles a month. Make a decision of whether an article merits a 1-sentence or 1-paragraph summary. Write your summary, and post it to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-06-21/In the media.
- Summarize any interesting and broad-interest Wikimedia community activity, particularly governance issues, in News and notes.
- Go to WT:NEWSROOM and join in any discussion. Start with unanswered or smaller posts. Your opinion and review is invited.
- Sign up as a copyeditor here, or if you want to start right away, go to WP:NEWSROOM#Article status. Find a scheduled submission which says, "
Ready for copyedit". If it also says, "No talk page section · click here to open one", then note that. Copyedit the submission using our coordination guide. After you check it, change the header template to |Copyedit-done = yes. Now either go post to the newsroom talk section, or click to open one as you noted. Say something about the piece you reviewed so that other editors can review whatever is most sensitive or could use more opinions. - Address any item in the Suggestions queue.
- 90+ minutes
- Make a submission, again at Submissions.
- With any frequency and no commitment issue to issue, take on any of the requested regular features. The general pattern with all of these is that you personally find interesting activity in Wikipedia, you ask the people involved for comment, you try to recruit them to write anything, then you fill in the blanks for a story. Popular and unstaffed currently includes Discussion report (summarize any interesting discussion anywhere in wiki), WikiProject report (summarize any group activity of any WikiProject), or the Arbitration report (summarize any arb proceedings, whether a case or anything else).
- If you figure out any of those reports, then you will have the skills to work out other kinds of reporting. Other kinds of possible reporting include WikiConference reports (at least two per month, most not reported), giving a community view on how to respond to the WMF's many requests for community input, and getting out the vote for elections including picture competitions or mass reviews for user rights, or rallying for petitions including in Meta-Wiki or cross languages.
- Revive any other story format in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Content guidance.
- Help with Signpost administration. Current needs include rallying consensus for an AI policy, picking one of the 20+ Signpost software tools and documenting how it works and what it accomplishes, and going through the newsroom talk archives for the past year and resolving any unresolved problem.
- Long-term
The Signpost is looking for people to take on long-term roles:
- Publication managers: Publishing The Signpost is a complex and multi-step semi-automated procedure, and maintaining the ready state of the publication go button is the primary responsibility of the publication manager. The publication manager is also able to pull the trigger themselves whenever they feel that The Signpost is ready for its monthly publication.
- Outreach managers: Editors delegated to assist the editor(s)-in-chief with managing The Signpost's tip lines, handling the occasional Signpost reader surveys, and maintaining The Signpost's social media accounts.
- Designers: These editors are tasked with maintaining The Signpost's distinctive visual appearance and template code, and helping to make sure that editors that wish to write articles don't get bogged down with procedural matters.
- Quick notes
- You might be involved in the matter of the story you want to write. If you are able to objectively write the story, go ahead. However, we encourage you to file the story ahead of the release deadline as your fellow editors and The Signpost's editor-in-chief may not be able to vet through in time before the release. Otherwise, make a submission and ping onwiki/approach offwiki any editors who have recently contributed to The Signpost for immediate assistance.
Discuss this story
As a longtime regular contributor to the Signpost myself (and former editor-in-chief), I second the invitation to contribute to the Signpost in genera;, and most of these are great suggestions.
However, readers should be aware that the three users who present themselves as "the editors" of the Signpost here form only a minority of the current team (in particular, they don't include the current editor-in-chief). This goes in particular for the video: While Bluerasberry has done lots of good work for the Signpost, he has also long had an unhealthy tendency to speak for the Signpost as a whole when expressing his personal conceptions of it; and there have been various occasions where several other people from the Signpost team felt that these conceptions were seriously at odds with basic journalistic standards, such as disclosing major conflicts of interests or separating advocacy and reporting. That is to say that you follow Bluerasberry's advice near the end of the video at your own risk (e.g. just a few weeks ago, ArbCom sanctioned a user for a topic ban violation stemming from their Signpost submission that Bluerasberry had supported and encouraged, after having already previously invited a similarly problematic submission by the same user that was rejected by the rest of the Signpost team).
Again, most of the suggestion here are great (including everything in the "10–30 minutes" section). But for others, particularly under "long-term", some of the information contradicts the Signpost's actual practices and documentation (under e.g. "Coordination", "Content guidance" or "About"). To give a concrete example (I already named some other discrepancies in our internal Newsroom talk page shortly after this was published): This article claims that But that authority has always been reserved to the Signpost's editor-in-chief, as documented under Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Coordination#Publication_Manager (and recently we carefully developed an modification of that under WP:EICAWOL). So don't believe this article that if you follow the invitation here and sign up for that role, you can publish in the Signpost whatever you like whenever you like ("feel ... is ready for publication").
Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:36, 21 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]