Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-10-19/Humour

Note: This column contains European humour.^{[citation needed]}

See also: Wikipedia:Identifying blatant advertising

Complaining about The Signpost and its self-righteousness is an exhausting task. Its poor editorial judgement continues, and it's almost unbelievable that, once again—contrary to WP:NOTPROMO—the newspaper mentions this same book. What a surprise, given its consistent blatant disregard for core Wikipedia policies. It's somewhat impressive how consistently it showcases this particular novel. We've moved well beyond subtle promotion, it's full-blown product placement now, complete with a link to the article about the publisher, which is, you've guessed it, tagged as containing promotional content. There is, needless to say, a double standard because if this book wasn't a novelization of Wikipedia, it wouldn't even get a footnote.

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

Figure 1: A graph from the researchers research report.

Many world-renowned researchers have researched this and produced many scathing research reports that found astonishing evidence that The Signpost violated Wikipedia's policies and guidelines regarding neutrality throughout the pre-order marketing window of this book. Through cutting-edge analysis of its coverage in their prestigious research facilities, worrying patterns of promotion, sensationalism, and undue weight in its reporting on this book were exposed in their bombshell research findings (shown in Figure 1). Wikipedia's policies and guidelines on maintaining a neutral point of view are made crystal clear, so it's scandalous that the newspaper—which is hosted on Wikipedia—ignored them when covering this book.

This unrequited love is made even clearer by the fact that the book doesn't even mention the newspaper. It takes real dedication to promote a single book this often, and it's reassuring to see that some things never change. Forfeiting neutral coverage in favour of incessant mentioning of this book is, to me, the beginning of the end of Wikipedia as we know it. If Wikipedia can no longer enforce a neutral point of view on its pages, it empowers editors to use the newspaper and its talk page subscriptions to launch outrageous promotional campaigns. It's a mockery of the need for neutrality to host this on Wikipedia. Imagine editing for Wikipedia, strictly adhering to policies and guidelines, and then seeing how the media elite of this website blatantly ignore all of these policies.