From the editor

By Ral315, 24 September 2007

Editor's note: This is a large article, but I really hope you'll read it all, because I find its results very important.

Last week, I asked readers to respond to a survey, in order to help us make the Signpost more relevant. I've reviewed the statistical results of the survey, which have been made available here. Of note:

• 510 users responded. I was honestly hoping for about 100 people to respond, and would have never expected so many responses. Thanks for your help.
• Given the number of respondents, and that about 15% of e-mail users responded, it might be estimated that about 2,000 to 3,500 users view the Signpost on any given week. (This is a small sample, and may not be representative; however, I think that this is a fair estimate nonetheless)
• 89.61% of respondents read the Signpost every week, or almost every week.
• Roughly an equal number of people view the Signpost via the Signpost front page and the template on the community portal and user pages. About half that number view it via the single-page view and the spamlist, and a relatively small number read via e-mail.
• The most popular feature was by far "News and notes", with 90% of readers viewing it on a weekly basis, and 36.5% calling it their favorite feature. "In the news" was also very popular.
• Only 20% of readers have suggested topics for us to write on.
• 61.57% of readers found the recent interview with Jimbo Wales informative; 87.1% felt we should do more interviews.
• Respondents favored interviews with ArbCom members and other notable Wikipedians, topically prominent Wikipedians, and technical staff; Board members, Wikimedia Foundation representatives, and wiki-related individuals such as Andrew Keen were less favored.

Non-statistically, I found a lot of very interesting comments about our coverage. Below, I've given a few of the criticisms sent to us, and attempted to explain the reasons why this lack of coverage occurred. I've also asked a few questions -- please leave comments on the talk page if you have a response. I think a few of these questions are important, and I'd like your further opinions on these particular issues.

• Lack of coverage of the 2,000,000th English article. I'll admit, our coverage of the 2 millionth article was scant. However, unlike last year, there wasn't much to cover. There was no official "two-millionth article", and I made the decision not to cover in-depth the attempts to try and find the two-millionth article, etc. The reason our article on the millionth article was so good (apart from the great writing of Catherine) was that much information was known, and there was a lot of press coverage at the time of writing. This was not the case for the two-millionth article, which occurred just a day before we went to press. Nevertheless, it probably would have been worth more coverage.

• Not a lot of questions on the Jimbo Wales interview. This was a scheduling issue -- Jimbo forgot about the interview initially, and then had to leave early due to a prior engagement. I think it might be best to handle future interviews via e-mail, as it's much easier to deal with these issues by allowing the interviewee to respond on their own time.

• Lack of coverage of other languages. A lot of people noted this -- this is a major shortfall. For a while, we had the interwiki report, which tried to cover other Wikipedias. The problem with that was that in most cases, we were unable to find editors from other wikis to help us out, highlighting important community issues. So, the interwiki report became mainly a statistical report on the wikis, because that's all a non-speaker could easily derive. I'll be honest: I'd be glad to have this back, but I don't have the time to handle it. Anyone who would be willing to be a liaison to other languages, please feel free to let me know. Outside a formal report, if any users active in other communities would like to report on happenings within that community, please let me know as well -- I'd love to publish items about German press coverage, or a Polish editing scandal, or whatever may come up within communities.

• More coverage of individual RFAs. Right now, we mainly just list the successful RFAs in the Features and admins report, sometimes commenting on a few notable RFAs briefly. The only time we usually discuss controversial RFAs is when they're the subject of bureaucrat discussion (borderline cases). A few cases, which I'll neglect to note specifically here for privacy reasons, were pointed out to me. These cases were not borderline cases, but were the subject of much discussion. Perhaps these should be the subject of future stories; if you think a particular RFA is worth mentioning, it would help us a lot to add a tip, to point us toward the specific RFA.

• Not enough coverage of editors. This is an interesting point that I think bears mentioning. A few people mentioned that people don't seem to get recognition in the Signpost unless they pass an RFA, are in an arbitration case, or do something else controversial that garners a story. What could we do to cover editors in detail, beyond mentioning featured articles weekly? Perhaps profiling WikiProjects? I had a few responses asking for that -- would anyone be interested in that?

• Non-coverage of meta-discussion from the mailing lists. As editor, I've tried to highlight important discussions on the mailing lists, and Michael Snow's always done a good job of picking those stories up. However, we don't often cover the discussions themselves if they don't bear fruit. Should we?

• The size. It was noted by one reader that since the Signpost started in January 2005, Wikipedia usage has grown significantly, and the Signpost has remained roughly the same size every week. Statistically, about 15 times more people view Wikipedia on a daily basis than did when we started. That's huge. Thus, one might expect the Signpost to grow as well. I would absolutely love to run 10-20 stories every week, but we don't have a big enough group of volunteers to sustain such a size. I'm sure that some of that is my fault; I've been very inactive outside of the Signpost, and haven't adequately responded to users interested in joining the Signpost. On the survey, 44 users indicated an interest in writing for the Signpost -- a phenomenal number, and I hope that we can get a lot more writers to help out.

On a side note, I cannot thank enough the people who have written articles in the past and present; your work is extremely important, and I don't think others get the credit they deserve. As editor, I do very little compared to the writers, who write and organize the majority of Signpost content. Thanks again.

I hope I'm not beating ourselves into the ground too much. The majority of commenters had little or no complaints, and felt that we were doing a good job. However, I feel that many of the issues that I've added above are systemic problems that can be addressed, and I will try to address them over the next few months.

Thanks for reading the Signpost.

— Ral315