Like any place with lots of action (Hollywood and Washington, D.C. come to mind), Wikipedia generates a body of news and gossip. When people are interested in something, they crave reading and talking about it. If you’ve been bitten by the Wikipedia bug, you’ll be glad to know there’s plenty of official news and unofficial gossip to satisfy your craving to know more.
If you expect to continue editing at Wikipedia for any length of time, by all means subscribe to the weekly internal newsletter, the Wikipedia Signpost. You can get it in any of three ways:
If you want to read the newsletter at your user talk page (User Talk Page Postings), go to the Signpost’s main page (shortcut:WP:POST), click “About the Signpost”, then “Tools”, and then “Spamlist”.
If you want the latest issue displayed on your user page (see Uses for Your User Page), go to the Signpost’s main page, click “About the Signpost”, then “Tools”, and then “Story template”.
If you want the newsletter delivered by email, go to http://wikipediasignpost.com/signup.php.
Another way to keep up with what’s happening with Wikipedia is to read the page within Wikipedia that tracks news stories, Wikipedia:Press coverage (shortcut WP:PC).
You can also get information about Wikipedia-related goings-on from the following sources (which Wikipedia’s guidelines define as not reliable sources).
Planet Wikimedia (http://en.planet.wikimedia.org) is a Web log (blog) aggregator operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Some of the posts are about wikis in general, and some are on topics peripheral to Wikipedia, but the quality is quite high, and interesting things are likely to show up here at least as quickly as anywhere else.
Wikipedia:Mailing lists (shortcut: WP:ML) provides links to subscribe to any one of a number of mailing lists. For the English Wikipedia, WikiEN-l is the most subscribed to (roughly 1,000 subscribers as of mid-2007). Before you sign up, read the threaded archives at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/. You may decide that the signal to noise ratio is lower than you want (Figure C-6).
Figure C-6. The archived messages of the WikiEN-l newsletter offer a good preview, before subscribing, as well as a way to look back through old messages to see what topics were hotly discussed.
If you want to talk about Wikipedia face to face, your best opportunities are regional meet-ups. Future (planned) events are listed on the Wikipedia:Meetup page (shortcut: WP:MU). Wikipedians have perhaps a half-dozen meet-ups per month, which may sound like a lot, but that figure is for all meet-ups across the entire world. Meet-ups that are not in North America, the UK, or Oceania are likely to focus on a non-English language edition of Wikipedia.