The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2026年08月02日. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-08-02/Arbitration report

• Alas, all my hopes and dreams of using dashes—something I wish to do often—have been dashed to pieces by AI; I can only hope that AI never starts using semicolons. ▰▱ Plural ▱▰ Talk 11:52, 2 August 2026 (UTC)
• Obviously I'm a dashing knight errant. kencf0618 (talk) 13:12, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Well, it has to be said that the article elides a few things.

In addition to the 2002 and 2003 press releases, in 2001, Jimmy himself credited Larry with the very idea of Wikipedia:

• After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process. As it turns out, Wikipedia is dramatically more successful on some measures, ...

This is backed by contemporaneous Nupedia-l mailing list posts – it was Sanger who

• first suggested "Let's make a wiki" ("No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not."),
• coined the word "Wikipedia", and
• announced that "Wikipedia is up! ("Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.")

Twenty-five years later, we are sitting here ...

More importantly, the article elides

• the September 2001 New York Times article
  • describing Jimmy Wales as "Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project",
  • mentioning "Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales",
  • describing "Larry Sanger of Las Vegas" and "Jimmy Wales of San Diego" as "the founders of Wikipedia, an online reference tool"
• the September 2001 MIT Technology Review article
  • citing "cofounder Jimmy Wales",
  • describing Wikipedia as a "free-wheeling Internet-based encyclopedia whose founders hope will revolutionize the stodgy world of encyclopedias" and "the brainchild of Wales and its full-time editor Larry Sanger".

Jimmy also described himself as "co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia" in 2002, explicitly referring to the above New York Times article as a place where people could read about the project.

Of course Sanger was an employee throughout, so presenting them as equal co-founders does appear odd, even allowing for the fact that Sanger championed the idea and organized the first community. Part of the reasoning surely was that the co-founder billing lent the fledgling project a veneer of academic respectability – Sanger had just acquired a Philosophy PhD, and academic respectability was considered important then. Note this visionary paragraph from the MIT piece:

• Wikipedia, which one might consider intellectual anarchy extruded into encyclopedia form with a chat feature thrown in, is stemming a tide against charging for content on the Web. But it will probably never dethrone Britannica, whose 232-year reputation is based upon hiring world-renowned experts and exhaustively reviewing their articles with a staff of more than a hundred editors ... Andreas JN 466 10:51, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Also, it should be noted that the Sanger quote starting "In 1999 ..." is about Nupedia, not Wikpedia. Hence the following comment: 'Any inconsistency between being "merely a grateful employee" and being a "co-founder" – a word he used four times in the Memoir – was not mentioned by Sanger."' is a non-sequitur. Sanger never claimed to be a co-founder of Nupedia. Andreas JN 466 18:09, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

• As a UK party, the correct name is Scottish Labour, not "Scottish Labor". Thanks, (in solidarity), JacobTheRox ^{(talk |contributions)} 10:35, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you, fixed and wikilinked. (You are also welcome to simply correct errors like that when you see them.) Andreas JN 466 11:32, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

• On the Buzzfeed quiz, 17 of 20 correct. Deor (talk) 13:16, 2 August 2026 (UTC)
• 17 out of 20 on the buzzfeed quiz. Some these are obvious lol. In all reality, I'd give myself 15 out of 20 since around two of them I wasn't sure of. Gaismagorm (talk) 13:26, 2 August 2026 (UTC)
• Well, for Coindesk, I think we see why they're deprecated: Even when an article clears the process, it can still be deleted by administrators or via a 7-day community vote, which cannot be appealed. Uh, yes it can be. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 14:38, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

  You may be amused to know that I raised the errors in the CoinDesk piece (and the "report" on which it's based) with a CoinDesk editor very shortly after the piece was published, and it was not corrected. This is not to bash that editor, who I quite like, but rather to note that CoinDesk simply doesn't have the capacity for reliability that would earn it a re-evaluation at RSP; they don't even have the bandwidth to issue corrections that were dropped on their doorstep. There was once a time where I actually might have agreed that CoinDesk had improved in its reliability and could at least be used for verifying factual claims if not for establishing notability, but I no longer hold that view. The company was sold to the Bullish crypto exchange in late 2023 and has gone rapidly downhill since — taking down articles that crypto billionaires didn't find sufficiently flattering, firing its editorial staff after they complained, and now publishing more and more articles that include "AI Boost" in the byline. There are a handful of competent journalists left, but a lot of the stuff they put out these days is pure slop.

  As for this "report", I was surprised CoinDesk even covered it. Besides its many inaccuracies, its conclusion is that "mainstream sources won't cover your no-name liquid staking protocol, therefore Wikipedia is wrong!" GorillaWarfare(she/her•talk) 17:10, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

• Does anyone have a citation to a reliable source that I can use the confirm the claim "Thousands of workers across the tech and nonprofit sectors have achieved voluntary recognition through this 'card check' method"? Ideally, this would be statistics showing what percentage of nonprofit/tech sector unionization efforts are decided by a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:38, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

  @Guy Macon most video game unions at Microsoft were voluntary recognition. Here is a database I will look through later, of all known voluntary recognitions https://github.com/labordata/nlrb-voluntary-recognitions ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah(talk) 17:32, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

As of the new board requirements, my standards for supporting WP:RfB are now bare minimum and I will support just about any active admin in good standing who runs in response to this, even if they don't have any intention to run for the board in a couple years. If a precedent is being set that there will be gatekeeping through bureaucrat rights, then lets start handing them out now. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 12:41, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

It is also very much easier to become a bureaucrat in some of the several hundred Wikimedia projects than others. Andreas JN 466 13:30, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

The two year requirement kinda limits the effectiveness of that approach.©Geni (talk) 16:34, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Which is why I qualified this with "precedent" and "start [...] now". Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:28, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Probably this story should note that the board expects to refine these requirements even now, as posted on the meta talk page even prior to some of the other breaking news in this column. Izno (talk) 18:12, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-08-02/News from Diff

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-08-02/On the bright side

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-08-02/Traffic report

• noting to the public that, after bringing this topic up from Wikimania, the editors at English Wiktionary are interested in starting a paper of their own in the coming months, with the gracious guidance of Noé! Juwan 🕊️ 🌈 10:24, 2 August 2026 (UTC)