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Just so you know, yesterday I made some changes and re-shuffled the blurbs at ITM, picking two or three that could serve as good lead stories (especially the Massachusetts ban), while also moving another story to the N&N column, as noted above.

Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have enough time to knock all of them out, since I need to focus on other tasks, but we should be able to bring the column to a decent shape... although we're already past the deadline. Oltrepier (talk) 15:13, 13 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging @Bri, @Smallbones, @JPxG, @Bluerasberry just for the heads-up. Oltrepier (talk) 15:14, 13 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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• Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Next_issue/News_and_notes

I posted news from today about Serbian Wikipedia editors banned

This is a development in a complicated multi-year story. These banned editors are highly active, with at least one each highly active in English Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons. I linked previous Signpost coverage here and have this framed to include a general explanation of what bans are and what they mean.

We have time to develop this but I started it now. Bluerasberry (talk) 17:18, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry Believe it or not, I've managed to work on and complete the article myself, hopefully I didn't turn it into an absolute trainwreck... Feel free to make further edits! Oltrepier (talk) 20:58, 12 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Oltrepier: I have a document of private notes about this case. It is not intended to be sensitive - it is just a collection of public links including to popular discussions on Serbian Wikipedia and some notes - but also I am not confident enough to share it here because something might become sensitive if I posted it all without care and it got misinterpreted. Do you want them?

For anyone else reading, if anyone wants to get access to these notes then identify yourself to me intent to edit or review this article. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:16, 14 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry Sorry for replying just now...

I don't think I would have enough time to properly check them out and add more details to the article, but if you do think they might provide some more insight, then go for it! I mean, you were the one who reported the news in the first place... : D Oltrepier (talk) 20:18, 14 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Oltrepier: I added more text and links. Review if you can. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:02, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry: you said ppl requested anonymity for safety. Was privacy also a concern? ☆ Bri (talk) 17:29, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bri: I meant privacy with the intent to create safety. I have notes that I can share with another Signpost editor or trusted Wikipedian. I am trying to balance my own not knowing anything about Serbia or its wiki community, versus trying to include some useful amount of local community perspective on what is happening. I also want to balance respect for the Wikimedia Foundation's decision - which so far as I know is welcomed and accepted - against the Wikimedia community's wish to learn enough about what happened to be able to govern itself, detect if other such problems exist, and to understand effective moderation.

If you see a way to better report this tone then freely change. I was not careful or precise in my wording, and it is all up for rephrasing. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:03, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry Done! I've tried to simplify some passages, and left a little note about the "concerned community" term you left towards the start of the article, since its meaning wasn't so clear to me. Oltrepier (talk) 20:36, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• WP:VPP - proposal to redo enwp as Esperanto
• WP:RFA - two joke RfAs, including a second mop to an established administrator

I don't know if we ought to cover April Fools' Day pranks but I noted the ones above. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:37, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Oh gosh I didn't kow these were cataloged. Found Wikipedia:April Fools/April Fools' Day 2026. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:40, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On a side note, I've moved Bri's original blurb on the partial bans on AI-generated content from ITM to N&N, since we should do a better service to the readers by hosting it there. I'm afraid I won't have enough time to work on that myself, though, since I've already spent the whole day completing the blurb on the sr.wiki bans and re-shuffling the rest of the articles on In the media...

Still, I hope all of that helps! Oltrepier (talk) 21:03, 12 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging @Bri just for a heads-up. Oltrepier (talk) 21:03, 12 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

My blurb on the AI ban is finally done. I can't help you further, though... Oltrepier (talk) 22:38, 13 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Politico's Eulogy for CIA Factbook does not mention Wikipedia, but it feels very encyclopedia-adjacent. Maybe it can be worked in somewhere? The closure of this and threatened blocking of sites to Internet Archive so close together seem to augur … something. ☆ Bri (talk) 13:55, 6 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Given that the Opinion and Op-Ed slots are already taken, I guess we could save it for the next issue... Oltrepier (talk) 20:09, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• @Bri: perhaps the former piece could be mentioned in "In the media" or as a note in "News and notes" this time, and a more thorough piece could be published in the next issue. Another option could be to use another section like "In focus" or "Essay", if you and the EIC can agree, perhaps with a thorough analysis of how the Factbook is cited in Wikipedia, discussed on talk pages, etc., and opinions on what could or should be used instead on Wikipedia going forward for sourcing similar information. ↠Pine (✉) 03:38, 14 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I put a brief mention as a note in News and notes. Was there a discussion on-wiki? I could not find any. Oh, Politico was running the syndicated AP story so I credited it as AP and linked directly to apnews.com. ☆ Bri (talk) 06:04, 14 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I usually report milestones in active administrators in News and notes. Could someone please double-check this before I include it?

Our last milestone (low) was 418 active administrators on 2024-10-07, reported in 2024-10-19 News and notes. We dropped below the former low point on April 10, and now are looking at 414 for a few days straight.

curprev 16:14, 13 April 2026 Rick Bot talk contribs m  9,749 bytes +7  Daily update, 414 active admins undothank
12 April 2026
curprev 16:14, 12 April 2026 Rick Bot talk contribs m  9,742 bytes +1  Daily update, 414 active admins undothank
11 April 2026
curprev 16:13, 11 April 2026 Rick Bot talk contribs m  9,741 bytes −58  Daily update, 414 active admins undothank

Thanks. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:41, 13 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bri: Yes, we are at 414, and this is the lowest it has ever been since we started tracking the admin count in 2014. Your interpretation of the bot count is correct and besides that this interpretation matches the analysis on this that Signpost last published. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:13, 14 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Now has dropped to 412. I shall write up in News and notes later this day. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:16, 15 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Bri WP:AELECT4 is coming up. I have written into the Brief notes section. Feel free to merge into the drop in active admins story! – robertsky (talk) 23:06, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good the way it is, I think. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:23, 18 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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As usual, we are preparing this regular survey on recent academic research about Wikipedia, doubling as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter (now in its sixteenth volume). Help is welcome to review or summarize the many interesting items listed here, as are suggestions of other new research papers that haven't been covered yet. Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:41, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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Copyedit done but I have a question for JPxG about the wisdom of the phrase "a drug-related bender at a Nevada brothel" in our publication. Even though it seems to likely be based in fact, it's a bit provocative for BLP. ☆ Bri (talk) 14:35, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

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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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