SignPost is on Life Support

[Zoloft]

Signpost status: On reserve power, help wanted

Dear Readers,
It is hard to believe it has been over three months since the last issue. We apologize for the hiatus in Signposting. We love publishing it, but are missing a few regular contributors. As a result some regular articles cover only part of recent months, and we can't yet say when the next issue will come out.
Help us return to a regular schedule! We are looking for editors, news submissions, and ways to simplify and publish. If you can help, or at least lob puns from the sidelines, please join us.

Know the feeling, we do.

[thekohser]

I will once again renew my offer (though I may not be so generous in the future)... if the Signpost will agree to thoughtfully consider news posts that I write, and if published, my name will go in the byline, I will write a piece about once a month for the Signpost. I have a proven track record of publishing news about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. They should know how to contact me. I'm not as talented as Andreas Kolbe, but nearly so.

[Poetlister]

I'm sure that plenty of people here would be delighted to write pieces saying what they think about Wikipedia. Vigilant?

[Dennis Brown]

I don't read it, to be honest. Maybe a bit or two a couple of times, and I've been quoted in it (those were the bits I read, wanted to see the context). More and more people seem to be interested in working in meta, (pa)trolling the admin boards or rewriting policies than writing articles or journalism. How about you Zoloft, why haven't you volunteered?

[Zoloft]

I don't read it, to be honest. Maybe a bit or two a couple of times, and I've been quoted in it (those were the bits I read, wanted to see the context). More and more people seem to be interested in working in meta, (pa)trolling the admin boards or rewriting policies than writing articles or journalism. How about you Zoloft, why haven't you volunteered?

Because anything I wrote would be at the mercy of the Wikimedia Foundation's editorial judgment, which as we well know is self-protecting.

[Dennis Brown]

I don't read it, to be honest. Maybe a bit or two a couple of times, and I've been quoted in it (those were the bits I read, wanted to see the context). More and more people seem to be interested in working in meta, (pa)trolling the admin boards or rewriting policies than writing articles or journalism. How about you Zoloft, why haven't you volunteered?

Because anything I wrote would be at the mercy of the Wikimedia Foundation's editorial judgment, which as we well know is self-protecting.

Maybe at the mercy of the Community, since it is a community "paper" not a Foundation one. Still, I understand the hesitation.

[Vigilant]

I'm sure that plenty of people here would be delighted to write pieces saying what they think about Wikipedia. Vigilant?

They read me here.
If they want me to write for them there, they can ping me.

I'm still waiting for them to acknowledge my engineering management expertise in calling out their worst projects and why.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

I see they have managed another edition, dated 23 June.

[Vigilant]

Well, I'm sure this will make everything better...

(Edited for readability. Probably something that the actual Signpost editor should have done)

Wikimedia Foundation changes

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganization of the Product and Technology departments.

The re-org is expected to deliver better product development with community engagement and an audience-based approach, a more efficient pipeline and to "better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction".

In the new organization:

* the Product department will be renamed the Audiences department.
* The Editing team becomes the Contributors team
* the Reading team the Readers team
* The Discovery team will be distributed to the Readers team and the Technology department (but will still work together on various projects)
* The Fundraising Tech team will be moved to the Technology department
* Team Practices group members working directly with teams in the Audiences and Technology departments will move into those teams
* and the rest will move to the Talent & Culture department, under the newly-appointed T&C Chargée d’Affaires Anna Stillwell.
* Four audience verticals will be condensed into three: Readers, Contributors and Community Tech.
* The Design Director role will be reintroduced.

The most useless rearrangement of broken deck chairs on the Titanic yet.

If this is the work of the new CTO, then calling her a lightweight was a vast understatement.

Edit:
The signpost was a hilariously bad condensation of this page.
Hilariously bad as in, "I saved some space on the page by removing all the consonants and white space..."

It's just as bad as I thought.
Victoria Coleman is a complete zero.

[greyed.out.fields]

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganization of the Product and Technology departments.

The re-org is expected to deliver better product development with community engagement and an audience-based approach, a more efficient pipeline and to "better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction".

In the new organization:

* the Product department will be renamed the Audiences department.
* The Editing team becomes the Contributors team
* the Reading team the Readers team
* The Discovery team will be distributed to the Readers team and the Technology department (but will still work together on various projects)
* The Fundraising Tech team will be moved to the Technology department
* Team Practices group members working directly with teams in the Audiences and Technology departments will move into those teams
* and the rest will move to the Talent & Culture department, under the newly-appointed T&C Chargée d’Affaires Anna Stillwell.
* Four audience verticals will be condensed into three: Readers, Contributors and Community Tech.
* The Design Director role will be reintroduced.

Or to summarise:

We have made a raft of cosmetic changes of no actual value.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

I asked for a few words about how the new structures will improve cooperation and collaboration in order to "better serve the movement". I'm sure we'll hear about that Really Soon Now. Meanwhile the Technical Collaboration Guidance seems to have gone the same way as its predecessor, the WMF product development process.

I am now ready to assert that all these exercises in involving the Community with the Developers are not and never were, seriously intended to produce any real change . The long lost of failed engagements suggests that these are things that some people, usually rather junior, at WMF think they ought to want, but have no authority or resources to implement; the people with the clout are sure that they need to be seen to be doing something, but there's no actual will to make them happen in a way that would cause real change that might make people uncomfortable. Lila tried that and got booted for her pains.

[Vigilant]

I asked for a few words about how the new structures will improve cooperation and collaboration in order to "better serve the movement". I'm sure we'll hear about that Really Soon Now. Meanwhile the Technical Collaboration Guidance seems to have gone the same way as its predecessor, the WMF product development process.

I am now ready to assert that all these exercises in involving the Community with the Developers are not and never were, seriously intended to produce any real change . The long lost of failed engagements suggests that these are things that some people, usually rather junior, at WMF think they ought to want, but have no authority or resources to implement; the people with the clout are sure that they need to be seen to be doing something, but there's no actual will to make them happen in a way that would cause real change that might make people uncomfortable. Lila tried that and got booted for her pains.

Lila failed the minute her CTO turned out to be a dud.

Had she replaced all department heads, starting with the CTO position, with her own people and then rammed through a metrics plan that captured just how little honest work was being accomplished by WMF engineering, she could have cleaned house all the way through.

As it is, she cleared out a ton of deadwood grifters:
* Brandon Harris aka Jorm
* Eric Moeller aka The Mo:leMan
* Oliver Keyes aka Ironholds aka ThroatPuncher
* Some dipshit in charge of HR
* Wil Sinclair
* Philippe Beaudette
* A bunch others that I can't be bothered to lookup


Some she missed:
* Ryan Kaldari aka Snuffster
* James Forrester
* James Alexander
* Sherry Snyder


What the WMF is trying to do technically is really pretty simple and has been done multiple times in multiple industries.

A short synopsis of why the WMF fails at engineering:

* Jimmy Wales has NPD and was given pretty much free reign to select the initial employees - bad
* They hired out of the cesspit of en.wp, primarily from ANI and IRC
* They had/have no idea how to hire engineers or anyone, really
* The Dunning-Kruger effect manifests so strongly at the WMF that they will likely be a future case study in a business textbook
* They pay less than the prevailing rate
* They have no stock options
* They headquartered themselves in the most expensive tech market in the country
* The valley is booming (I turn away > 20 recruiters a week these days - hand to god)
* The engineers hate their customers
* The customers hate the engineers
* The "support" people they hire seem to come from some "aggressive sociopaths anonymous" meeting
* Nobody inside understands regression testing and bugs from years past are routinely introduced back into release code
* There don't appear to be even basic specifications, requirements, test specifications
* They reorg constantly - see above
* They can't hire competent C-level managers because they are a dumpster fire of bad press and corruption
- Who, from the tech industry, would want to be "CEO" of the WMF after the way the WMF board treated Lila Tretikov?
* The board is staffed with morons, sycophants and grifters

There are so many things wrong with the WMF and the only reason that they still exist is that the fundraising group knows what they're doing....



Here's a great metric for the WMF to contemplate.

They've spent, conservatively, $30M USD on the Visual Editor.
They've succeeded in thoroughly pissing off several major wikis through their forced deployment of this broken, sad, shitty editor.
After the better part of a decade, they still have almost nobody using it.

The most recent 1000 changes to article space on en.wp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?na ... entChanges

Searching for "Tag: Visual Edit" yields 25 matches.
Doing the math shows that only 2.5% of article edits are done with the VisualEdsel.
(German wikipedia is a similarly grievously disappointing 3.8%)

Digging just a tiny bit further into the quality of the edits made shows that many of these edits are trivial housekeeping edits and not article creation types of edits.

Heading over to WP:VEF, shows a robust set of bugs being reported, rereported, being labeled WONTFIX, etc, etc, etc

Just the most recent example:

Leaving an edit page

There are times when I need to backspace to make corrections and for some reason, the focus has left the formatting, so the backspace key takes me back to the previous page, making me lose the edits. There's some kind of confirmation modal dialog but it happens way too fast for me to realize what it's asking. What would help is if that dialog did not default to "leave the page." It should stay on the page unless explicitly selected otherwise. If not for this design decision, the visual editor would be more useful. As it is, I've lost up to 30 minutes of edits at a time and have adopted a practice of interim saves to make sure a lot of work isn't lost, but that does not reflect well in the edit history. 196.52.2.44 (talk) 02:55, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?!
Unintentional hilarity.

Edit:
Just one more!

Cursor is not where it's shown on screen

I don't know what is going on here, but as you can see from the bug reports, I am submitting, the VE is almost unusable at the moment. So many things are broken. I had to stop adding navboxes and commons categories with it because of the bug where it jumps to display the top of article when I am working at the bottom of the article. I did a lot of my work today in source editor because the VE is just manifesting so many weird bugs. Stuff that used to work has stopped working. Yes, I have rebooted, yes I have ensured I am using the most up-to-date OS and browser, yes I have cleared my cache. I cannot run VE training classes with this sort of thing not being fixed. I am seeing no response to my bug reports. Kerry (talk) 07:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Oh lawdy!


To summarize, the decline of the Signpost is just the most recent sign of the inevitable rot that comes from neglect and deferred maintenance due to employing only the most blind and incompetent gardeners.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

The HR person whose name eluded you was Gayle Karen Young, who rejoiced in the title of "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" until leaving in April 2015. She returned in August 2016 as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee.

[Vigilant]

The HR person whose name eluded you was Gayle Karen Young, who rejoiced in the title of "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" until leaving in April 2015. She returned in August 2016 as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee.

Of course she did.

[Randy from Boise]

I asked for a few words about how the new structures will improve cooperation and collaboration in order to "better serve the movement". I'm sure we'll hear about that Really Soon Now. Meanwhile the Technical Collaboration Guidance seems to have gone the same way as its predecessor, the WMF product development process.

I am now ready to assert that all these exercises in involving the Community with the Developers are not and never were, seriously intended to produce any real change . The long lost of failed engagements suggests that these are things that some people, usually rather junior, at WMF think they ought to want, but have no authority or resources to implement; the people with the clout are sure that they need to be seen to be doing something, but there's no actual will to make them happen in a way that would cause real change that might make people uncomfortable. Lila tried that and got booted for her pains.

Lila failed the minute her CTO turned out to be a dud.

Had she replaced all department heads, starting with the CTO position, with her own people and then rammed through a metrics plan that captured just how little honest work was being accomplished by WMF engineering, she could have cleaned house all the way through.

As it is, she cleared out a ton of deadwood grifters:
* Brandon Harris aka Jorm
* Eric Moeller aka The Mo:leMan
* Oliver Keyes aka Ironholds aka ThroatPuncher
* Some dipshit in charge of HR
* Wil Sinclair
* Philippe Beaudette
* A bunch others that I can't be bothered to lookup


Some she missed:
* Ryan Kaldari aka Snuffster
* James Forrester
* James Alexander
* Sherry Snyder


What the WMF is trying to do technically is really pretty simple and has been done multiple times in multiple industries.

A short synopsis of why the WMF fails at engineering:

* Jimmy Wales has NPD and was given pretty much free reign to select the initial employees - bad
* They hired out of the cesspit of en.wp, primarily from ANI and IRC
* They had/have no idea how to hire engineers or anyone, really
* The Dunning-Kruger effect manifests so strongly at the WMF that they will likely be a future case study in a business textbook
* They pay less than the prevailing rate
* They have no stock options
* They headquartered themselves in the most expensive tech market in the country
* The valley is booming (I turn away > 20 recruiters a week these days - hand to god)
* The engineers hate their customers
* The customers hate the engineers
* The "support" people they hire seem to come from some "aggressive sociopaths anonymous" meeting
* Nobody inside understands regression testing and bugs from years past are routinely introduced back into release code
* There don't appear to be even basic specifications, requirements, test specifications
* They reorg constantly - see above
* They can't hire competent C-level managers because they are a dumpster fire of bad press and corruption
- Who, from the tech industry, would want to be "CEO" of the WMF after the way the WMF board treated Lila Tretikov?
* The board is staffed with morons, sycophants and grifters

There are so many things wrong with the WMF and the only reason that they still exist is that the fundraising group knows what they're doing....



Here's a great metric for the WMF to contemplate.

They've spent, conservatively, $30M USD on the Visual Editor.
They've succeeded in thoroughly pissing off several major wikis through their forced deployment of this broken, sad, shitty editor.
After the better part of a decade, they still have almost nobody using it.

The most recent 1000 changes to article space on en.wp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?na ... entChanges

Searching for "Tag: Visual Edit" yields 25 matches.
Doing the math shows that only 2.5% of article edits are done with the VisualEdsel.
(German wikipedia is a similarly grievously disappointing 3.8%)

Digging just a tiny bit further into the quality of the edits made shows that many of these edits are trivial housekeeping edits and not article creation types of edits.

Heading over to WP:VEF, shows a robust set of bugs being reported, rereported, being labeled WONTFIX, etc, etc, etc

Just the most recent example:

Leaving an edit page

There are times when I need to backspace to make corrections and for some reason, the focus has left the formatting, so the backspace key takes me back to the previous page, making me lose the edits. There's some kind of confirmation modal dialog but it happens way too fast for me to realize what it's asking. What would help is if that dialog did not default to "leave the page." It should stay on the page unless explicitly selected otherwise. If not for this design decision, the visual editor would be more useful. As it is, I've lost up to 30 minutes of edits at a time and have adopted a practice of interim saves to make sure a lot of work isn't lost, but that does not reflect well in the edit history. 196.52.2.44 (talk) 02:55, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?!
Unintentional hilarity.

Edit:
Just one more!

Cursor is not where it's shown on screen

I don't know what is going on here, but as you can see from the bug reports, I am submitting, the VE is almost unusable at the moment. So many things are broken. I had to stop adding navboxes and commons categories with it because of the bug where it jumps to display the top of article when I am working at the bottom of the article. I did a lot of my work today in source editor because the VE is just manifesting so many weird bugs. Stuff that used to work has stopped working. Yes, I have rebooted, yes I have ensured I am using the most up-to-date OS and browser, yes I have cleared my cache. I cannot run VE training classes with this sort of thing not being fixed. I am seeing no response to my bug reports. Kerry (talk) 07:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Oh lawdy!


To summarize, the decline of the Signpost is just the most recent sign of the inevitable rot that comes from neglect and deferred maintenance due to employing only the most blind and incompetent gardeners.

I scooped some of that: linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carr ... ngineering[/link]

RfB

[thekohser]

The HR person whose name eluded you was Gayle Karen Young, who rejoiced in the title of "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" until leaving in April 2015. She returned in August 2016 as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee.

Yeah, but how many of us have our own bird-logo for our name, huh?

[Vigilant]

The HR person whose name eluded you was Gayle Karen Young, who rejoiced in the title of "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" until leaving in April 2015. She returned in August 2016 as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee.

Yeah, but how many of us have our own bird-logo for our name, huh?

Perfect.

An aggressive predator that has the brain pan volume of a tablespoon and eats bottom feeders.

[Tippi Hadron]

Found while idly stalking Sj's contributions to meta this morning. Here he is commenting on a modest $5000 grant request for a Signpost *publisher,* hell yeah!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants: ... _publisher

The Signpost is an English language Wikimedia community newsletter which has been published regularly since 2005. Its popular articles have a history of getting 5,000 views when, for context, the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation board elections got 5581 votes. This is a community newsletter for highly interested Wikipedians. Other publications and research feature content from The Signpost as a record of Wikimedia community interests. Some people would say that The Signpost deepens Wikimedia community engagement in guiding how the Wikimedia Foundation spends millions of dollars every year. The problem is that the labor required to publish The Signpost is great and there is a long history of difficulty attracting anyone to perform the publication. The technical act of publication is complicated and a typical Wikipedian cannot do it.

Sj doesn't seem to know much about what an editor-in-chief actually does. Or a publisher, for that matter. Time was when I thought his smarts outweighed his smarmy. Shniff.

Having two tiers of contributors, with only a few called "editors", and a single editor in chief who has to make the final publishing decision, clearly slows things down. Most of the 20+ contributors are fully capable of deciding what submissions look ready and publishing a new issue. I don't think there's a need for an editor in chief rather than a set of people all able to make any editorial and publishing decision on the spot. [imagine having to run all admin actions by an Admin in Chief! that's expressly not the role bureaucrats or stewards fill, for good reasons.]

This bit seems especially pathetic.

Most of the 20+ contributors are fully capable of deciding what submissions look ready and publishing a new issue.

Another commentard, Jamesjpk, seems even more ill-informed. Like a good wikipedian.

I support this only if the publisher being paid $100 per week also wrote at least four articles a month. $100 per week seems huge compared to the work. Jamesjpk (talk) 04:57, 12 June 2017 (UTC).

"$100 *per week* equals yuge? At least four articles a month?" Dude, where do you live? In your parents' spare room?

Anyclueless, if memory serves, the Signpost still has some of WP's most avid female power-grabbers on its books: hapless self-promoter Rosie Double-Barrel Whatever and the insufferable Brenda Wahler aka Montanabw. The mind boggles as to why these two didn't rise to the occasion of turning the Signpost into a more kitten-friendly, wiki-feminist publication, given the month-long power vacuum.

Oh, wait, you mean they were only in it to be *seen* to be doing something? You mean they were at best crap at their pretend jobs with the Signpost? Oh deary, deary me. Where's the tenuous gamergate connection? Quick, let's bring on a white knight. Where's Pete Forsyth if you knead him? (Yay, here's a deliberate typo for Kohs to salivate over, whoop-dee-doo!)

Oh, look, bad language on the talk page of that meta discussion,from some insignificant Jimbo-juicer with a penchant for K-pop.

This famous Signpost who has campaigned against Lila Tretikov, Arnnon Geshuri and others, pretending to be representative of a large part of the community, is now quite defunct. Maybe the fucking fuckers are tired, and the readers too. Asking that someone become paid for:

1. Wrangle contributors to be timely with submitting content
2. Collect all content from contributors
3. Deliver submitted content to editor for approval
4. Publish content at the editor's direction
5. Respond to any messages about problems
6. Collect readership metrics and other relevant performance metrics
is astounding. Points 1,2,3,5,6 are editorial tasks, not technical ones. And the very act of publishing (4), i.e. transferring some pages from a private space to a public space don't appear to be more complicated that any other publishing task done by any other volunteer here. Why no granting 100$ to anyone publishing something or 5000$ to anyone using en::Template:Routemap ? Pldx1 (talk) 20:35, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Keilana "fuck this and fuck you" to the rescue! At least that one was willing and able to write.

[thekohser]

Welcome back, Tippi! (Punny typos are always welcome here.)

[Vigilant]

Good to see you, Tippi.

I've missed you.

[Poetlister]

I expect that all the regulars have.

[tarantino]

Caw!

[HRIP7]

Caw!

[Midsize Jake]

"$100 *per week* equals yuge? At least four articles a month?" Dude, where do you live? In your parents' spare room?

He's definitely under 18, and still attends some sort of school (most likely the Peak to Peak Charter School (T-H-L) in Colorado), so I'd say the most likely scenario is that he has his own personal bedroom there.

And yes, it's always good to see you!

[Earthy Astringent]

Keilana "fuck this and fuck you" to the rescue! At least that one was willing and able to write.

What do you mean by that one?

Sorry to thread jack, but did anyone see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emily Temple-Wood (T-H-L)? I'm not criticizing her because she had nothing to do with that AfD or article but holy shit, this is some Grade-A navel-gazing.

Claims that AfD and other "discussion" venues is "!vote" and the strong arguments win is one of Wikipedia's biggest lies. Σ (T-C-L) summarized this AfD quite on point, and his thoughts are applicable all across Wikipedia: (emphasis added)

This AfD began with a perfectly legitimate concern. In response, the original claim to deletion has been battered down by the heavy artillery and volleys of cold, hard evidence, doubly counted by a thousand rubber-stamped nods of approval. And yet it remains undamaged by this cannon fodder, standing as high as any Chinese wall.

Because it really was just cannon fodder, a paper tiger fluffed up and magnified by the amplifier of the mass media. True, the subject has been covered by many news outlets in March 2016. Rhododendrites was kind enough to give us specific links. But looking closer, all of them are derived from the initial Wikimedia blog post, and none of them have added a noteworthy scrap of new information.

Okay, that last part isn’t entirely true; The Washington Post adds how she makes herself a cup of tea.

But for some inexplicable reason, people drive by to rubber-stamp a keep vote, none of them adding a noteworthy scrap of new information to the discussion.Although extra eyes are generally good, laziness and the frailty of humans turns them into mirrors, unhealthy for any discussion.If, as an editor who voted keep, you think that the subject is truly notable, consider this: I conducted my own investigation in tandem with my analysis of the arguments presented in the AfD.

His analysis was quite detailed, and easily refuted the simple "count the sources" votes. One strong argument should win over dozens of weak ones. But did the closing admin consider this? They did what the majority of admins do. They tally the votes. On some occasions some closers will summarize a discussion, but that doesn't happen often.

AfD is broken

[Zoloft]

That is a bit of a thread-jack, and Tippi, that's easily the most amusing post about the pathetic goings-on over at Wikipedia I've seen for a while.

Proposing to pay way too little for a job to be done that they don't understand. Trying to ensure that The SignPost returns to being a house organ with no inconvenient critical thinking in it.

Things change over at that place but seldom for the better.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

All of which is exactly why this proposal should be supported with enthusiasm. The supprting arguments should make it plain that there is an implicit assumption that "well-behaved" volunteers will be given bungs out of the WMF trough, and healthy debate could be got going about why others don't get equal snout time. Plus the Signpost becomes a visible lapdog. What's not to like?

[Vigilant]

Caw!

A twofer.
I've missed you too, Andreas.

[HRIP7]

Good find, Tippi.

Bluerasberry says,

USD 5000 is requested. The publisher would be paid USD 100/week for publishing The Signpost. Weekly duties would be as follows:

1. Wrangle contributors to be timely with submitting content
2. Collect all content from contributors
3. Deliver submitted content to editor for approval
4. Publish content at the editor's direction
5. Respond to any messages about problems
6. Collect readership metrics and other relevant performance metrics

His proposal is well-intentioned, and I broadly sympathise with it. The problem is that jobs 1 to 5 can't really be done in isolation from the editor(s)-in-chief and Tony1, the other key Signpost writer, who'll always have more leg work to do on this than the publisher (or publication manager, in current Signpost parlance). They have to read submissions, proofread them, fact-check them, and suggest and agree changes with the authors. Much of that naturally impinges on the timeline, so in practice the publisher cannot really "wrangle contributors", but will simply have to wait for the key content people to get the content job done.

That means the publisher really would be overpaid at $100 a week, because the actual job of publishing a new issue, while clunky – it involves mucking about with templates to convert drafts into articles, putting the new front page with the issue's contents together, putting the old one in the archive, getting the mass messages out to subscribers, sending a mailing list notification etc. – really only takes three hours or so even if done by hand (which was the norm during my time, as the script usually broke down). I reckon that's less than the authors of regular Signpost sections like "Featured content", "Traffic report", and "Recent research" put in. (They always did a sterling job, by the way, putting out their sections like clockwork, without the need for review or oversight – in part because most of these sections are also published elsewhere.)

On the other hand, researching, reviewing and writing the other Signpost sections like "News and notes", "In the media" plus op-eds and special reports, reviewing guest authors' op-eds, plus general coordination, liaison and editorial board discussions take two or three people about 10 to 25 hours each, per Signpost issue ... which explains the staff shortage, as few people have the luxury of doing a non-paying part-time job in addition to their day job for months or years on end, plus the requisite writing skills to go with that.

Of those who did most of that work in recent years, Ed got a job with the WMF blog, Gamaliel dropped out after the Trump controversy, I had too much other stuff on my plate to continue, and then something similar seems to have happened to Pete; leaving Tony, who can't do everything on his own.

Proper funding would help, but as Carrite points out on Meta, that immediately raises the question of editorial independence: it's hard to see how funding by the WMF would not compromise this. Moreover, if the Signpost is published on Wikipedia, or Meta even, the obvious question arising in most people's minds will be why Signpost staff should be paid when everybody else – including functionaries who are putting in similar hours, as do a few very prolific article writers – is volunteering. I guess you could try to publish the Signpost on a standalone site with its own funding, but then it wouldn't really be the Signpost any more (which might or might not be a good thing).

The Signpost did some great work, especially around the time of Geshuri, the Heilman dismissal and the Knowledge Engine. Tippi and Tarantino shared occasional research with me that went into the Signpost. This included Tarantino's find that the WMF's Orange partnership had come to an end (which the WMF kept completely mum about) and a vital bit of evidence in the Knowledge Engine story, when Tippi found a Knight Foundation page openly announcing the approval of the Knowledge Engine grant on September 1st 2015, while the WMF, its staff and board in turmoil, sat on it for months and only made a big-splash announcement of the grant in January 2016, as though it had only just happened.

Afterwards, the WMF said they couldn't release the grant documentation because of "donor privacy". This seems to have been a flat-out lie, made with the connivance of the WMF board, because the Knight Foundation, when contacted about this, said they had no problem at all with the grant documentation being made public. And as soon as the Knight Foundation told the WMF that they had been contacted about this, the WMF released the documentation (some internal documents had by then also been leaked to the Signpost by WMF staff).

For all that, the WMF never tried to put pressure on the Signpost to conform to some preferred editorial line, and the current hiatus is simply due to people being too busy to put in the hours.

[Tippi Hadron]

Good to see you, Tippi.

I've missed you.

I've missed you too, you handsome devil!

Like Andreas said, tarantino and I had a ball providing him with some of our finest research while he was with the Signpost and I've witnessed first-hand how much work the writers put into each issue. tarantino and you have a similarly daunting task ahead in making this site relevant again. Fingers crossed. :)

[Moral Hazard]

The HR person whose name eluded you was Gayle Karen Young, who rejoiced in the title of "Chief Talent and Culture Officer" until leaving in April 2015. She returned in August 2016 as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee.

Yeah, but how many of us have our own bird-logo for our name, huh?

That picture suggests that Tim prepare a report on boots and other footwear.

[Tippi Hadron]

That picture suggests that Tim prepare a report on boots and other footwear.

What a delightfully relevant post. :(

Team Reform has its work cut out indeed. Apologies to Midsize Jake for not including him previously as the prospective future admin of Wikipediocracy. Ditto for Zoloft, as the current admin and prospective future trustee who has put so much work into the site. No slights were intended. Senile dementia is a thing of beauty.

Sorry to thread jack, but did anyone see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emily Temple-Wood (T-H-L)? I'm not criticizing her because she had nothing to do with that AfD or article but holy shit, this is some Grade-A navel-gazing.

I agree wholeheartedly. Deleting that article would have been kinder to the young adult as well, as these vanity biographies can turn sour when their subject messes up subsequently. However, that particular subject seems smarter than her fellow gender-gapper discussed here who couldn't get rid of her bio quickly enough once it went from flattering to embarrassing.

Speaking of notability, the French Wikipedia seems to have more sensible criteria for inclusion than en-wp. A nice example comes in the shape of the deletion discussion for the article about Wikitribune, which was created at a time when that publication had yet to publish anything.

Depuis quand une campagne de crowdfunding pour un projet dont le lancement a été annoncé aujourd'hui (25 avril 2017) est admissible sur Wikipédia ?
Je suis d'accord avec le fait que le lancement bénéficie d'une couverture médiatique conséquente par la presse française et étrangère mais cela ne laisse rien présager quant au futur.

Rough translation
Since when is a crowdfunding campaign for a project whose launch was announced today (25 April 2017) considered suitable for inclusion on Wikipedia? While the launch received significant coverage by the French and foreign media, that is hardly an indicator for what will happen in the future.

Ugh, this is fast turning into work. Which means it's time for me slink back into semi-retirement, this time of my own volition. I've come to quite appreciate leisure time not spent poring over WP diffs and other nonsense, and don't get me started about how long it took me to write most of my blog posts. And, yes, I realize that parts of this post would probably be better off in the thread about Wikitribune, but that thread itself would be better off in the Off-topic section, what with having little do with Wikipedia criticism as such. Ack, my head! Ta-ta for now (I hope).

[thekohser]

Afterwards, the WMF said they couldn't release the grant documentation because of "donor privacy". This seems to have been a flat-out lie, made with the connivance of the WMF board, because the Knight Foundation, when contacted about this, said they had no problem at all with the grant documentation being made public. And as soon as the Knight Foundation told the WMF that they had been contacted about this, the WMF released the documentation (some internal documents had by then also been leaked to the Signpost by WMF staff).

I received an e-mail reply from Alberto Ibarguen at the Knight Foundation on February 23, 2016, where he said "We don't object to their disclosure." I hope that my small act was helpful in bringing that to light.

[Moral Hazard]

Ugh, this is fast turning into work. Which means it's time for me slink back into semi-retirement, this time of my own volition. I've come to quite appreciate leisure time not spent poring over WP diffs and other nonsense, and don't get me started about how long it took me to write most of my blog posts.
And, yes, I realize that parts of this post would probably be better off in the thread about Wikitribune, but that thread itself would be better off in the Off-topic section, what with having little do with Wikipedia criticism as such. Ack, my head!
Ta-ta for now (I hope).

[HRIP7]

Afterwards, the WMF said they couldn't release the grant documentation because of "donor privacy". This seems to have been a flat-out lie, made with the connivance of the WMF board, because the Knight Foundation, when contacted about this, said they had no problem at all with the grant documentation being made public. And as soon as the Knight Foundation told the WMF that they had been contacted about this, the WMF released the documentation (some internal documents had by then also been leaked to the Signpost by WMF staff).

I received an e-mail reply from Alberto Ibarguen at the Knight Foundation on February 23, 2016, where he said "We don't object to their disclosure." I hope that my small act was helpful in bringing that to light.

I phoned the Knight Foundation contact for the Knowledge Engine grant on February 10, on behalf of the Signpost team. He was about to go into a meeting then, but we exchanged emails the day after. He seemed like a really great guy, and was happy to help. He told me that the Knight Foundation didn't have a problem with the documentation being released, that actually their "default is openness" and that they "leave it up to [their] grantees to decide whether and how to release grant correspondence". He informed the WMF of our exchange. The WMF responded by publishing the document instantly.

Guy Macon put together a useful timeline of the whole Knowledge Engine thing a few weeks ago (it's in the bottom third of that long talk page section), and he kindly updated it after I reminded him of the role of the Signpost on his talk page.

As I mentioned to Guy, one wonders why nothing happened after Jimmy Wales told people wanting to see the grant documentation this, a full month prior:

What sort of details do you want? I'll have to talk to others to make sure there are no contractural reasons not to do so, but in my opinion the grant letter should be published on meta. The Knight Grant is a red herring here, so it would be best to clear the air around that completely as soon as possible.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|talk]]) 18:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Three weeks later, Wales was on Lila's talk page, and so must have been fully aware Lila had just said that the reason the board hadn't published the documentation was because doing so would "break donor privacy". Wales even made an edit restoring that info to Lila's talk page when Pete tried to move the discussion to another more suitable page.

Why did the board not publish this grant paperwork?

Generally we do not post donor documents without advance agreement, because doing so breaks donor privacy required in maintaining [[Fundraising principles|sustainable donor relations]]. ...

As Jytdog pointed out on Wales' talk page, the WMF has never properly addressed what went down there, nor clarified whether blaming donor privacy concerns for the lack of transparency was Lila's or the board's idea. I'm sure we all have our guesses.

So yes: contacting third parties in situations like this, when the WMF blames others for a lack of openness and transparency, is – sadly, as one would wish one could trust WMF board members – a really good idea.

[thekohser]

It further underscores how on top of things you were at Signpost, Andreas -- even a couple of weeks ahead of me, snooping around at Knight Foundation. Great work!

[Vigilant]

It further underscores how on top of things you were at Signpost, Andreas -- even a couple of weeks ahead of me, snooping around at Knight Foundation. Great work!

It makes me pine for the olden days...

[Jim]

It further underscores how on top of things you were at Signpost, Andreas -- even a couple of weeks ahead of me, snooping around at Knight Foundation. Great work!

It makes me pine for the olden days...

I know, right?...

[Renée Bagslint]

A recent Signpost piece, "Good faith gibberish", chooses to mock the claimed incomprehensibility of certain Wikipedia articles, two of which are mathematics articles by the same author. There are three things which, taken together make this a matter of concern.

• This mean-spirited and unfunny article is by an account self-described "as a WP Visiting Scholar, and Wikipedian in Residence". It is thereby flagged as an emanation of the movement.
• The alleged incomprehensibility of the mathematics articles, which are correct and succinct, is entirely attributable to the ignorance of the Signpost's author and editors. Even those completely ignorant of mathematics could have used Google Books to discover that the Federer–Morse theorem (T-H-L) is not, as suggested, a hoax.
• The author selected for mockery in this way, r.e.b. (T-C-L), is not only an expert, but an extremely distinguished mathematician, a Fields Medallist, at a level equivalent to a Nobel prize-winner in another discipline. He has written numerous WP articles on mathematics and I have long thought that Wikipedia did not deserve his time and energy. Now I'm sure of it.

So there we have it. A Wikpedian-in-Residence makes it clear that "experts are scum". Is this the message the Wikipedia community chooses to present going forward?

[mynameisnotdave]

A recent Signpost piece, "Good faith gibberish", chooses to mock the claimed incomprehensibility of certain Wikipedia articles, two of which are mathematics articles by the same author. There are three things which, taken together make this a matter of concern.

• This mean-spirited and unfunny article is by an account self-described "as a WP Visiting Scholar, and Wikipedian in Residence". It is thereby flagged as an emanation of the movement.
• The alleged incomprehensibility of the mathematics articles, which are correct and succinct, is entirely attributable to the ignorance of the Signpost's author and editors. Even those completely ignorant of mathematics could have used Google Books to discover that the Federer–Morse theorem (T-H-L) is not, as suggested, a hoax.
• The author selected for mockery in this way, r.e.b. (T-C-L), is not only an expert, but an extremely distinguished mathematician, a Fields Medallist, at a level equivalent to a Nobel prize-winner in another discipline. He has written numerous WP articles on mathematics and I have long thought that Wikipedia did not deserve his time and energy. Now I'm sure of it.

So there we have it. A Wikpedian-in-Residence makes it clear that "experts are scum". Is this the message the Wikipedia community chooses to present going forward?

I was not sure how to react to this part of the recent publication. Indeed some of those articles are a little humorous, but I think it might not have been appropriate for it to be published in the Signpost. Locker room stuff really.

[Kingsindian]

A recent Signpost piece, "Good faith gibberish", chooses to mock the claimed incomprehensibility of certain Wikipedia articles, two of which are mathematics articles by the same author. There are three things which, taken together make this a matter of concern.

• This mean-spirited and unfunny article is by an account self-described "as a WP Visiting Scholar, and Wikipedian in Residence". It is thereby flagged as an emanation of the movement.
• The alleged incomprehensibility of the mathematics articles, which are correct and succinct, is entirely attributable to the ignorance of the Signpost's author and editors. Even those completely ignorant of mathematics could have used Google Books to discover that the Federer–Morse theorem (T-H-L) is not, as suggested, a hoax.
• The author selected for mockery in this way, r.e.b. (T-C-L), is not only an expert, but an extremely distinguished mathematician, a Fields Medallist, at a level equivalent to a Nobel prize-winner in another discipline. He has written numerous WP articles on mathematics and I have long thought that Wikipedia did not deserve his time and energy. Now I'm sure of it.

So there we have it. A Wikpedian-in-Residence makes it clear that "experts are scum". Is this the message the Wikipedia community chooses to present going forward?

It's an op-ed marked as "humour". I would not read it as representative of the "Wikipedia community", whatever that is. By the way, the author Barbara Page, is a member here.

As for the content of the op-ed itself, Wikipedia has the perennial problem of being not sure of who the "implied reader" is for an article. I did not find the lead for the "Context Switch" article to be particularly dense: according to this readability analyzer, it is about "college graduate" level, which is roughly when the material would typically be taught (maybe college undergraduate, but close enough). Incidentally, it has roughly the same readability as the lead for Rhetoric (T-H-L). The lead for "Context Switch" does contain jargon; but the words are all wikilinked, and one really needs some background before one can understand the concept.

[Renée Bagslint]

It's an op-ed marked as "humour". I would not read it as representative of the "Wikipedia community", whatever that is. By the way, the author Barbara Page, is a member here.

The piece is attributed to an account User:Barbara (WVS) (T-C-L), self-described as "a WP Visiting Scholar, and Wikipedian in Residence", rather than to her personal account Bfpage (T-C-L). I don't know what that means precisely but the choice of account and terminology certainly sounds like some kind of attempt to assert some kind of status within the community. Sneering at world-class experts, and accusing them of hoaxing, because you are too ignorant to understand what they are writing about, is not what I call humour, and it is not what I call being a scholar. But if Barbara Page is indeed a regular here, then I welcome her speaking for herself.

[lonza leggiera]

…

• The author selected for mockery in this way, r.e.b. (T-C-L), is not only an expert, but an extremely distinguished mathematician, a Fields Medallist, at a level equivalent to a Nobel prize-winner in another discipline. He has written numerous WP articles on mathematics and I have long thought that Wikipedia did not deserve his time and energy. Now I'm sure of it.

…

Do you have unequivocal confirmation that r.e.b. (T-C-L) is Richard Borcherds (T-H-L)? He was asked if that was the case on his talk page some 10 years ago, but didn't answer the question. Given his contributions to Wikipedia, the identification certainly seems highly plausible to me, but I haven't been able to verify it conclusively.

[Poetlister]

Borcherds is undoubtedly a great mathematician, but the Fields medal is not, and does not pretend to be, the equivalent of a Nobel prize. It is only awarded to people under 40, and of course it is rare for anyone to get a Nobel prize that young. Closer to a Nobel prize is the Abel Prize (T-H-L).

Having said that, I totally agree that Wikipedia does not deserve him as an editor and the bighead who wrote the article should be censured. Then again, an undoubted Nobel laureate, Brian Josephson, was once blocked on Wikipedia.

[Renée Bagslint]

Do you have unequivocal confirmation that r.e.b. (T-C-L) is Richard Borcherds (T-H-L)? He was asked if that was the case on his talk page some 10 years ago, but didn't answer the question. Given his contributions to Wikipedia, the identification certainly seems highly plausible to me, but I haven't been able to verify it conclusively.

Yes, I do.

[lonza leggiera]

…

He [i.e. r.e.b. (T-C-L)] has written numerous WP articles on mathematics and I have long thought that Wikipedia did not deserve his time and energy. Now I'm sure of it.

…

…

I totally agree that Wikipedia does not deserve him as an editor

…

It looks like Prof. Borcherds might have come to the same conclusion himself, earlier this year. After a total of 43,631 edits over the period from March 2005 to February 2017, with no editing break of any longer than two months, he has not now made a single edit since.

[Renée Bagslint]

Wikipedian Visiting Scholar and Wikipedian-in-Residence Barbara Page has apparently declared herself humour editor of the Signpost. Her second attempt at humour selects a more worthy target, and she spells the word correctly, and she is also a contributor here, so I suppose she will be forgiven.

[Zoloft]

Wikipedian Visiting Scholar and Wikipedian-in-Residence Barbara Page has apparently declared herself humour editor of the Signpost. Her second attempt at humour selects a more worthy target, and she spells the word correctly, and she is also a contributor here, so I suppose she will be forgiven.

I’ve exchanged a few emails with her and find her intelligent and funny.

[Renée Bagslint]

It's nice to see a prediction verified so quickly. I wonder what Professor Borcherds thought?

[Bezdomni]

Barbara Page... humour...

intelligent and funny.

Yes, but this last post *is* pretty cryptic... though I admit I enjoyed Barbaras's oblique comments on creolizin'. (I did not know of lyonnais butcher-shop slang and will have to conduct some inquiries at the local Halles (which are outrageously overpriced and cater to the bobos. That said, la Mère Richard *does* know her cheese... )

Oh, son of a bi-bi, son of a bi-bi-, son of a bi-bi-bi-...

23. (... à tes souhaits1 ...)


In prime numbers (and furbishers) we trust. Cf. BU Rob13

---

1 what you say when someone has just sneezed