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New ways to read and share the Signpost

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By Tilman Bayer

Apart from reporting on the English Wikipedia, The Signpost routinely covers stories from elsewhere in the Wikimedia world (for example, see this week's "News and notes" on activities of the French and Dutch chapters), and is read by many Wikimedians from other projects. Starting this week, we are offering a global subscription service that can deliver each new Signpost issue to user talk pages on any Wikimedia project (example). You can subscribe (and unsubscribe) on the Sign-up page on Meta.

This is an extension of the existing talk page delivery on the English Wikipedia, which has over 1,000 subscribers and is carried out by MZMcBride's bot EdwardsBot, which has reliably distributed more than 47,000 Signpost copies since October last year, in addition to other newsletters. The new global message delivery service is also based on EdwardsBot, and is open to others who need to establish subscriber networks across other Wikimedia projects.

Another new feature we are introducing with this issue is a "Share this" list of links on each page, enabling readers to easily share our articles via email, Twitter, Facebook and other social bookmarking sites. Although it is standard practice on many news sites to arrange them into a conspicuous icon bar, we tried to keep them unobtrusive – click "show" to expand the list in the top right corner. Suggestions and problems can be reported here.

In related news, The Signpost's Twitter feed (inaugurated 18 months ago and also available on Identi.ca) surpassed 1,000 followers last week. Apart from announcements of each new Signpost issue, it contains notice of Wikipedia- and Wikimedia-related news in advance of more detailed coverage in the next Signpost issue. And for a few weeks now, the official Wikipedia page on Facebook has been featuring highlights from new Signpost issues.

To serve this expanding readership, we still need more good writers, especially for the following two beats:

One possibility for helping out is to write up suggestions from our tip line – even if it just becomes a short note in the "Briefly" part of a section. Or you could scour the sources listed on our resources page, which has an overview of each section's scope. For more advice, participate in the Newsroom, ask regulars in our IRC channel #wikisignpost webchat, or contact wikipediasignpost@gmail.com.

We hope all readers are enjoying The Signpost, and we welcome feedback and questions.


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In this issue
20 September 2010 (all comments)
  • From the editor
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  • In the news
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    Great work on those Share tools. That was really something that was missing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:50, 20 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    It would be nice if there was some way to make the Share tools use the short URL http://enwp.org/, e.g. http://enwp.org/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-09-20/From_the_editor . --pfctdayelise (talk) 03:31, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    That would be useful, but I'd hesitate to recommend it as long as enwp.org doesn't have a privacy policy (all URL shorteners are in a position that enables them to track surfers. Using logs from enwp.org, one could conceivably gather the IP addresses of many high profile Wikipedians entirely without Checkuser access. Not that I have reason to suspect Tl-lomas is doing this; it is a general, long-term concern). I hear that there are plans at the Foundation to set up its own shortening service, which would be covered by the Foundation's privacy policy. Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:41, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    It's great that you chose an unobtrusive approach, but maybe it was a bit too unobtrusive: I didn't notice the share tools until it was pointed out that they were in the upper right corner. Maybe if the "share this" text had an icon next to it (http://www.openshareicons.com perhaps?) it would be more visible and discoverable. --Waldir talk 07:21, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    I partly agree; but it's very hard to prevent an icon from being obstructive of the images and text we put at the top of the articles. We tried one mid-last-week that was difficult in this respect. Actually, I find the design of the current arrangement just first-class (User:Mono's work, I think). Tony (talk) 08:03, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    What about a grey version of the Open Share icon ? File:Shareicon.svg ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:30, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    It was done by Pretzels, like most of the current Signpost design. Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:41, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    One slight adjustment that might be considered is to bring the [show] button closer to the "Share this" button, so that there are three words in the bunch—that might be a little more prominent, without affecting the nice design and the unobtrusiveness of the function. Tony (talk) 10:53, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    I like the share this option. You should report on the most shared items like the Wall Street Journal and Time do.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 19:45, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    Clicking on "share this" is intuitive, yet doesn't do anything. Users need to click on the "[show]" button, which may or may not relate to "share this" as the size and weight of the text is different. Get rid of the "[show]" button, make it so when you click "share this", it shows the options as it currently does. Get rid of clutter, make it easier to use. 192.93.164.28 (talk) 16:55, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    I'd love to, but there's no way I know of doing this on the English Wikipedia. We're severely limited to the code we can use, and templates have to be super accessible and display on all types of setups. Let me know if you find a safe way of achieving that. — Pretzels Hii! 17:57, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    No clue how to do it, but I first tried clicking on "Share this". Whoops. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:56, 27 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Well there are a few things we can do. We can make it a full CSS hover menu. We just add a small Wikipedia namespace specific css to the global css. To make it a click menu as well however, we need to resort to JS. Again, we could add this to global JS, I don't think anyone will really mind, as long as it is not usable in article namespace. Note that such elements won't be accessible for screenreaders if they don't have JS enabled. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:27, 27 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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