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• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/From the editors

We had an AI submission and declined to run it. The person whose piece was declined requested that we clarify Signpost policy to decline AI, and I think that is a good idea.

I have this piece framed as "from the editors". I invite anyone to co-sign on this, and also anyone to edit any or all of this text, including deleting or changing it.

In addition to announcing no AI, I also framed this as a general appeal and invitation for more user participation. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:35, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry Apart from a few minor duds here and there, I think this is a very good piece. Thank you for crafting it! Oltrepier (talk) 21:50, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I have this piece framed as "from the editors". - I seem to recall earlier discussions here about how this title can be problematic, or how Bluerasberry has at times tended to represent himself as speaking for "The Signpost" when that wasn't warranted. I am not quite certain who "the editors" of the Signpost are, but if I am among them, I need to say that I don't agree with this text in its current form. I invite anyone to co-sign on this - more than a week later, nobody has done so. I certainly won't.

I just got around to reading this piece and the discussion above that had triggered it. I do generally agree that we need to reject submissions more aggressively at times, in particular if there are concerns about their quality or in case the amount of pushback they are likely to generate is in no relation to their journalistic value (I have in fact been thinking about starting a discussion about the former, focusing on some other recent examples). But I disagree with this new policy as formulated by Bluerasberry here, and I also think it goes well beyond JPxG's (entirely understandable) remark above I do not want to run a LLM op-ed for the sake of letting someone defend themselves when the main thing they're accused of is using LLMs in a way that pissed everybody off. Bluerasberry could have posted his policy draft here or at WT:POST for discussion among the team, but decided not to. So I don't feel obliged to edit any or all of [his] text that he already lined up for publication, or to embark on a comprehensive review of possible unintended consequences of his policy wording. But just as a small example to demonstrate that I'm not making up concerns or trying to be difficult: While I have so far written all the text in my Signpost contributions by hand, I did, for example, use ChatGPT to create the table at Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2025-10-02/Recent_research (by compiling information about the WMF grants program there that are published in many different pages; and yes, I checked every table entry by hand but it still saved a lot of time). I think this was a valuable service for our readers, but under Bluerasberry's policy, this would be prohibited.

Again, I sympathize greatly with not wanting to run LLM-generated op-eds specifically, but also because I generally think that the Signpost has had too many low-quality opinion articles in recent years. (Happy to provide examples, but that's another discussion; let me mention though in that context that I'm also not convinced of the value of Bluerasberry's frequent exhortations to our readers to submit more opinion pieces - e.g. also in this draft, or in the last issue in a very oddly framed story draft involving AI that both Smallbones and I felt compelled to correct before publication. I do appreciate of course that Bluerasberry is doing lots of valuable work for the Signpost, also in managing submissions; for example he did us all a great service earlier this year by being the first team member to call out issues in a very problematic - and ultimately spiked - submission).

Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:16, 18 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Bluerasberry:, while I appreciate the good intentions here, I believe that policy announcements should come from the editor-in-chief, and also that a piece framed as "From the editors" requires consensus, so I too disagree with publishing this as written. However, I'm fine with having a discussion about publishing this in a later issue after JPxG and others have a chance to form a consensus. For the purpose of avoiding having this piece go into publication without further discussion, I will boldly move it out of the queue for this issue. I could see a modified version of this piece being published in a later issue, whether as "From the editors", as op-ed, or in a "From the editor" statement from the EIC. Thank you for the time you put into this, and perhaps a version of this can be run in a later issue. ↠Pine (✉) 23:18, 18 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@JPxG: I moved the content of the draft to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/From the editors draft moved 2026-04-18. The original page Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/From the editors is now blank. I deleted the redirect to prevent accidental publication of the moved content. Hopefully this doesn't cause technical issues with how the newsroom is set up for publication. You may wish to delete Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/From the editors before publication in case the publication script would publish an empty page. Based on the discussion above, I hope that you understand why I did this, although you can override my action in your editor-in-chief capacity. Apologies for any extra work for you. ↠Pine (✉) 23:45, 18 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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