Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

Katherine Maher, former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation and current CEO of NPR, hasn't "brought a tote bag to a knife fight" according to The New York Times. Indeed, the Times calls her "aggressive, refusing to compromise with Congress" while handling multiple crises. She can be "unyielding".

Soon after her appointment, the right-wing press called for her ouster after publishing some of her old tweets. Maher responded that they were her personal tweets from long before she joined NPR and told the Times that "I really don’t like bullies". See prior Signpost coverage here

Being CEO of NPR is a difficult job, she is the seventh CEO in the last fifteen years. And the last year has been exceptionally difficult with $500 million in funding cut off by the federal government, and congressional hearings titled "Anti-American Airwaves: Accountability for the Heads of NPR and PBS." Under Maher NPR even sued the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

She will soon be taking maternity leave. Congratulations, Katherine and keep up the good work. – S

D.F. Lovett on his substack Edit History says he to has been contacted by Ovsk Mendov who was "officially banned by the WMF". Mendov tells Lovett that he "recently leaked a massive quantity of sensitive information from WMF wikis and am about to release it." If true, this could be a really juicy story or more likely lead you to hundreds of pages of the most boring stuff you've ever read. Messages from ticked-off blocked sockpuppets are like that. This story does have a couple of interesting sections however. The letter from Trust and Safety blocking Mendov does look authentic and could only have been released, according to WMF rules, by the blocked editor. The other interesting section discusses two websites, Wikipediocracy and "Wikipedia Sucks", which are critical of Wikipedia. Lovett suggests that Wikipediocracy has become too tame and has too many members or Arbcom editing the site, to really stay a Wikipedia criticism site. But Wikipedia Sucks has kept the faith and is still dishing out the real stuff. – S

Eesti Rahvusringhääling (ERR), Estonia's government supported public broadcasting organization, states that "Estonian volunteers (are) struggling to protect Wikipedia (in English) from Russian propaganda". It's a bit more complicated than that, but ERR's source, the newspaper Digigeenius (in Estonian and partially paywalled) wrote three articles on the topic over eight days in some detail. The Estonian editors on enWiki have been trying to maintain an earlier status quo that listed the birthplace of Estonians born from 1940-1991 as simply Estonia, but other, presumably Russian, editors were changing this to Estonian SSR, USSR. At first glance, the Estonian position looks weak. Wikipedia favors simple facts over ideological interpretations. From 1940-1941 and 1944-1991 births in the area of Estonia were recorded by the government of the Estonian SSR. From 1942-1944 the area was controlled by the Nazi Germany army. The 1940 Soviet takeover followed quickly after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact when the Soviets and Nazis secretly divided eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Estonia's argument is that the occupation and annexation of Estonia was illegal and never agreed on with Estonians.

ERR quotes Ronald Liive from Digigeenius who calls the birthplace campaign "mass manipulation on an industrial scale." (Summaries of ERR text added by The Signpost in parentheses)

A single user has systematically altered nearly 600 profiles of prominent Estonians. From EU High Representative Kaja Kallas and WRC champion Ott Tänak to supermodel Carmen Kass.

Their birthplaces were forcibly changed to "Estonian SSR, Soviet Union." This is not a technical correction; it is a deliberate attempt to erase the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia. In one instance, this user spent 21 hours and 40 minutes straight redacting Estonian history."

(When Estonian volunteers tried to change the articles, they were banned for "pushing a nationalistic narrative.")

Meanwhile, articles like Kaja Kallas's have been locked in their distorted pro-Kremlin state, preventing further factual corrections.

(Liive noted similar issues with the Estonian War of Independence, which he said is being "redefined.")

In several key articles (including the Estonian War of Independence), "defensive campaign" has been replaced with "offensive campaign... Estonia's birth is being framed as "separatism from Russia," aligning perfectly with modern imperialist rhetoric.

The case for the Estonians now looks much stronger. An RfC at the Manual of style on how to record the birthplaces was closed as "no consensus". The obvious compromise of listing the birthplaces as "Estonia under Russian occupation" was suggested but ignored by both sides.

The user who "spent 21 hours and 40 minutes straight redacting Estonian history" is still a mystery. How does one person edit for over 20 hours straight? User xxx, who added many "Estonian SSR" edits and occasionaly edit warred over them, did indeed put in several 20+ hour days making manual edits on several topics (not all on Estonian hstory). to be continued.

"Provisional Bondi Truths: Containment, Power, and the Struggle to Name Palestine on Wikipedia", published at countercurrents.org, looks at a number of issues that came up at the English Wikipedia in 2025. Among several intriguing insights about Wikipedia are these:

"[L]ong-standing governance logic on Wikipedia [is] most visible in Israel/Palestine coverage, where politically charged topics are managed through timing, attribution, and deferral — determining not only what may be stated, but when claims become speakable and whose framing is allowed to appear as neutral knowledge.

and

Official statements are elevated to anchor the framing; structural or contextual analysis is pushed downward; contested interpretations are withheld pending “further verification.” The lead language contracts to what carries the least procedural risk, even when that narrowing strips the event of the structural context that gives it meaning.

– B

• https://www.jns.org/wikipedia-debating-if-attack-targeting-jews-at-sydney-chanukah-event-was-terror/ (Jewish News Syndicate)
• https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/machines-like-us/article-wikipedia-won-our-trust-can-we-use-that-model-everywhere/ (The Globe and Mail)
• https://www.wosu.org/show/all-sides/2025-12-16/tech-tuesday-wikipedia-co-founder-jimmy-wales WOSU-FM The Ohio State University
• Dr. Doom demands deletion of damaging deets: Peter Schiff "accused Wikipedia and its editors of refusing to correct what he described as false and damaging claims on his biography page." ccn.com (published by Find.co) and partner content version covered at Yahoo Finance.
• "Nasty freelance editors" "deleted my wiki": bemoans Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marc Coppola (actor) [1] How is WSRW (AM) involved?
• Subtitle: Text text text. Stephen Harrison (author), Amy Bruckman (Georgia Tech), and Annie Rauwerda (Depths of Wikipedia) discuss Wikipedia on Connecticut Public Radio Colin McEnroe Show podcast [2]
• Echoes of ANI lawsuit?: "Wikipedia Changes Entries On Indian News Channels After Report Points To Bias" (ABP News). The report suggests that editors' sensitivity to neutrality in descriptions of Indian media is due to the ANI case that was heard by the country's Supreme Court (see prior Signpost coverage).
• Subtitle: Text text text.
• Subtitle: Text text text.
• Subtitle: Text text text.
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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

Sidebar images To put an image in your article, use the following template (link): I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2 |size = 300px |fullwidth = no |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. Inline images Placing {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Inline image |size = 300px |align = center |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} (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. Galleries To create a gallery, use the following <gallery style="float:right;" mode=packed | heights=200px> |TKTK |TKTK </gallery> Each line inside the tags should be formatted like File:Whatever.jpg|Caption). This creates: Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners. It wants to have nothing further to do with the object as such, and believes that it can exist in and for itself. If you want it centered, remove tstyle="float:right;" from the first line.

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Article series

To add a series of 'related articles' your article, use the following code Related articles Visual Editor Five, ten, and fifteen years ago 1 January 2023 VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief 5 August 2015 HTTPS-only rollout completed, proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts 17 June 2015 VisualEditor and MediaWiki updates 29 April 2015 Security issue fixed; VisualEditor changes 4 February 2015 More articles Draft namespace, VisualEditor meetings 25 December 2013 Sockpuppet investigations, VisualEditor, Wikidata's birthday, and more 6 November 2013 Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor 25 September 2013 Making Wikipedia more accessible 4 September 2013 Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia 28 August 2013 The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change 31 July 2013 Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles 31 July 2013 VisualEditor in midst of game-changing deployment series 3 July 2013 VisualEditor will "change world history" 12 June 2013 VisualEditor, elections, bots, and more 12 June 2013 The Visual Editor: Where are we now, and where are we headed? 25 March 2013 Visual Editor "on schedule" for July rollout 18 March 2013 Looking ahead to 2013 7 January 2013 The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual 10 December 2012 Second Visual Editor prototype launches 25 June 2012 Visual editor demo launched, hailed as "most important change to our user experience ... ever"; but elsewhere over-hasty deployments criticised 19 December 2011 Full steam ahead on Visual Editor, the avoidance of lock-breaking and 1.18b1 release 7 November 2011 {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = no }} or {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = yes }} will create the sidebar on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. A partial list of valid |tag= parameters can be found at here and will decide the list of articles presented. |seriestitle= is the title that will appear below 'Related articles' in the box. Alternatively, you can use {{Signpost series |type = inline |tag = VisualEditor |tag_name = visual editor |tag_pretext = the }} at the end of an article to create For more Signpost coverage on the visual editor see our visual editor series. If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet.