The Signpost got 380,000+ views in 2018; sounds reasonable enough, right?

Special report

The Signpost got 380,000+ views in 2018; sounds reasonable enough, right?

In 2018, the fourteenth year of The Signpost, a total of 157 articles have been published spanning 12 issues from January to December. Collectively these 157 articles, created by 64 Wikipedia users, have received a total of 353,134 pageviews until 7 December. After including views from the first page and the single-page edition the pageviews sum reaches 388,484. These 12 issues have also seen a total of 1,222 comments, totaling 96,473 words.^[a]

The Signpost statistics 2018, an effort to understand The Signpost, throws up various other findings, such as:

The article in The Signpost which has the highest all-time pageviews in 2018 is "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?". Out of the 157 articles it is the only article to have crossed 5,000 views this year. However, when considering highest page views attained in one week, the article "News and notes: Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend" has the most with 2,290 pageviews.
On average, an article in 2018 got 848 pageviews in one week and 2,387 all-time page views.
Only five articles in 2018 have crossed 4,000 page views (all time), listed below:

2018's highest viewed articles (till 7 December)
Date	Article title	Pageviews (all-time)
29 Mar	Op-ed: Death knell for The Signpost?	4,988
29 Jun	From the editor: The Admin Ship is still barely afloat, while a Foundation project risks sinking	4,068
30 Aug	News and notes: Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend	4,061
20 Feb	News and notes: The future is Swedish with a lack of administrators	4,054
29 Jun	Discussion report: Deletion, page moves, and an update to the main page	4,038

Average views per article (one week total) for the first six months – January to May – is 780, and for the last six months – June to December – is 906. Although this indicates a general increase in readership per article from the beginning of 2018 to the end of the year, this increase in readership cannot be observed when average all-time views per article are considered.
Over 80% of all page views of any given Signpost article come in the first four weeks.

Which categories of articles get the most pageviews?

"Op-ed" and "From the editor" articles have the highest average pageviews (one week totals). "Op-ed" articles get an average of 1,340 pageviews and "From the editor" articles 1,320 pageviews. Gallery articles get the least pageviews.

How many users have contributed to The Signpost in 2018?

10 Wikipedia users for The Signpost in 2018 amount to 72.8% of the total byline mentions, with the remaining 54 users accounting for the remaining 27.2% of byline mentions. (This includes bylines for 'essays', 'from the archives' and 'blogs', which may have just been "selected" by the user.)
103 articles out of the 157 have only one name in the byline; that is, 65.6% have either been written or compiled by one user. The remaining 54 articles have two or more names in the bylines.

How many comments did The Signpost get in 2018?

Seven articles in 2018 (Issue 1 to Issue 12) generated comments crossing 4,000 words. 42 articles got one or no comments.

2018's most commented-upon articles (till 20 December)
Article title	No. of comments	No. of commentators	Total words
Op-ed: Has the wind gone out of the AdminShip's sails?	79	37	11,460
Op-ed: Death knell for The Signpost?	73	34	7,436
News and notes: Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend	72	35	4,877
Op-ed: Wikipedia's Strickland affair	61	36	5,621
Op-ed: What do admins do?	47	15	4,567
Community view: It's time we look past Women in Red to counter systemic bias	28	21	4,327
Opinion: Google isn't responsible for Wikipedia's mistakes	28	21	4,102

How many users subscribe to the The Signpost?

A total of 1,149 users have added their names to the user-talk page delivery list. Template subscription transclusions total 2,007, whereas the global delivery list currently has 227 users.

Footnotes

^ Total words has been calculated excluding signatures. Each signature generates an approximate of seven words in MS Word, the word counter used to count the total words in comments.

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If you have any opinions or comments on this article please do write them down here. I am looking forward to doing a follow up piece on this in the next issue and will incorporate reader comments into it. Thank you. DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 15:03, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like articles about adminship grab a lot of eyeballs. As a fan of the Traffic Report, I'm surprised it isn't higher in ranks of type of article most viewed. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:07, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz: - bear in mind that many go directly to Wikipedia:Top 25 Report for the weekly, lengthier report. It has scored 160,000+ hits throughout the past year, and this may account for the discrepancy in views, with each individual weekly report grabbing 3,000 or so views. Stormy clouds (talk) 16:46, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I was also surprised, but Stormy clouds quick insight of ~160,000+ views makes sense. This is an interesting case, how most people prefer to go to the original source of the traffic report, something they are more comfortable and familiar with, knowing also that it is regularly updated. Compare this with say this issues op-ed, which may have got many many more views when covered by other media sources, whereas in Signpost, the article still has generally the same number of views which a high-view Signpost article gets. DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 08:15, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This makes a case for the importance of The Signpost at the center of Wikimedia community attention and also at how low the ratio of content contributors to readers is. Wow. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:26, 31 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry: That's an interesting point to note, the contributors to readers ratio. I wonder what the average ratio is in general for writer to reader ratio in media houses etc, I'm sure that may also be very low, much lower than Signpost maybe? Same case for Wikipedia articles... contributor to reader ratio for some are huge. I was also thinking about how low the ratio is for active Wikipedia users to contributors to Signpost. But I am sure this can also be explained by various factors including decrease in meta wiki stuff. Anyway, thank you for the insights. DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 08:03, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you include Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost and all subpages (including talk pages), the total views comes out to ~1.3 million [1]. There are some discrepancies between Massviews (disclaimer: authored by yours truly) and User:DiplomatTesterMan/Signpost Statistics, but much of that I assume is because of when the data was gathered. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:02, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Going off of Category:Wikipedia Signpost archives 2018 and all the subcategories, which I presume would include all articles, we get ~394,500 pageviews [2]. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:11, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@MusikAnimal: The time period for the data gathered is: 16 Jan 2018 to 7 Dec 2018. If this parameter is put into the massviews analysis tool, a total of 354,862 [3] is displayed. This is very close to the figure mentioned in the article, which is 353,134 views. This is a discrepancy of 1728 views. This is explained in two ways. 1. The massviews tool lists 158 pages, which includes Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Archives/2018, which accounts for 1449 views. I have not included this. 2. I have also made a difference of 1 day in Issue 1, which has been counted till 6 Dec 2018, which I have forgotten to mention anywhere. This accounts for 65 views. This leave a total discrepancy of 314 views, which I again know is my human error after quickly comparing my table with the massviews table. I think these points should sort out the discrepancies. (And I would just like to point out that the massviews tool is awesome and such a useful wiki tool!, I should actually attribute you in the final compilation of this report too, thanks!) Thanks for mentioning the total Signpost views also. DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 07:53, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
So in the Signpost Statistics 2018 page I have officially mentioned and thanked the three of you for the tool which helped make these statistics possible, the names as mentioned at the bottom of the pageviews and massviews site, MusikAnimal, Kaldari and Marcel Ruiz Forns. I also just want to add that I use the pageviews tool so much and helps in analysis A LOT LOT!!! Thank you! DiplomatTesterMan (talk) 08:31, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost is looking for new talent.

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