The Signpost

From the editor

New for The Signpost: Author pages, tag pages, and a decent article search function

Just two short weeks ago, you were promised the world by a heady editor with a gleam in his eye. Well okay, you were promised "something". I'm pleased to announce a couple of somethings (this issue going out late is not one of them). The chief developments we've gotten out of the last couple weeks have been a usable article search function, individual byline pages and tag series pages, made possible by Module:Signpost and Wegweiser (with some bug fixes on the last made possible by the heroism of Mr. Stradivarius).

Byline pages

Everyone else has these, and now so do we. For example, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/Michael Snow will bring you an automatically generated index of every article from our first editor-in-chief, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/Smallbones will bring you a weal of hard investigative reporting, and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/JPxG will bring you a bunch of articles written by JPxG. An index of all individual byline pages is here, and a sortable table of all authors in the history of the Signpost can be found here.

While there are far too many individual authors to reasonably make byline pages for everyone (which would be nearly a thousand pages), limiting it to authors with at least ten article credits brought it to a more manageable hundred-and-some. There was intense effort involved in getting WegweiserBot to parse all of the author data, and then going through it to eliminate the weird errors from the initial run. Since we've gone 18 years without a systematic effort to clean up the metadata, there were plenty of author fields with weird stuff in them like "3 July 2006", "03 July 2006", or "{{{2}}}". Also, we had stuff like "brassratgirl" versus "Brassratgirl", or "Andreas Kolbe" versus "Andreas Kolbe (leads" versus "Andreas Kolbe 1 April 2016 19:58 (UTC)" versus "Andreas Kolbe 19 March 2016 21:12 (UTC)".

After spelunking into the depths and cleaning up all that garbage, my conclusion is that there have been 926 distinct authors in the Signpost's history. Of these, all 926 (duh) have written at least one article, but only 415 have written two or more, and only 122 have written ten or more. The distribution looks something like this:

This many people have written at least this many articles
0 500
1 450
1 400
2 350
3 300
3 250
4 200
7 150
18 100
34 50
41 40
54 30
72 20
90 15
122 10
192 5
223 4
289 3
415 2
926 1

Man, wouldn't that be a neat graph? Too bad I don't feel like making one.

Tag series pages

Related articles
From the editor

NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!
10 January 2024

A piccy iz worth OVAR 9000!!!11oneone! wordz ^_^
24 December 2023

Beta version of signpost.news now online
31 August 2023

Some long-overdue retractions
3 April 2023

New for the Signpost: Author pages, tag pages, and a decent article search function
4 February 2023

We heard zoomers liked fortnights: the biweekly Signpost rides again
16 January 2023


More articles

A new goose on the roost
31 October 2022

Rise of the machines, or something
1 August 2022

A changing of the guard
29 May 2022

We stand in solidarity with Ukraine
27 March 2022

Selection of a new Signpost Editor-in-Chief
27 February 2022

Here is the news
28 December 2021

Different stories, same place
31 October 2021

A change is gonna come
25 April 2021

What else can we say?
28 March 2021

Meltdown May?
31 May 2020

The bad and the good
29 March 2020

The ball is in your court
1 March 2020

Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium
27 January 2020

Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again
27 December 2019

Put on your birthday best
29 November 2019

Where do we go from here?
30 September 2019

Picture that
31 May 2019

Help wanted (still)
28 February 2019

Time for a truce
1 December 2018

Help wanted
3 February 2016

The Signpost‍ '​s reorganization plan—we need your help
28 October 2015

Change the world
22 July 2015

The Signpost tagging initiative
24 June 2015

Your voice is needed: strategic voting in the WMF election
20 May 2015

A salute to Pine
18 March 2015

A sign of the times—the Signpost revamps its internal structure to make contributing easier
4 March 2015

We want to know what you think!
11 February 2015

An editorial board that includes you
28 January 2015

Introducing your new editors-in-chief
21 January 2015

Looking for new editors-in-chief
24 December 2014

The Signpost needs your help
1 October 2014

The Signpost needs your help
20 November 2013

Call for contributors
21 August 2013

Signpost developments
5 June 2013

Signpost–Wikizine merger; new writers
11 March 2013

Wikipedia, our Colosseum
31 December 2012

Signpost expands to Facebook
17 September 2012

Signpost adapts as news consumption changes
10 September 2012

Signpost developments
23 July 2012

New editor-in-chief
21 May 2012

A call for contributors
24 October 2011

Changes to The Signpost
19 September 2011

Stepping down
11 July 2011

New ways to read and share the Signpost
20 September 2010

Changes to the Signpost
7 June 2010

Reviewers and reporters wanted
10 May 2010

Introducing Signpost Sidebars
26 April 2010

Writers wanted to cover strategy, public policy
1 February 2010

Call for writers
11 January 2010

250th issue of the Signpost
7 December 2009

Perspectives from other projects
12 October 2009

Call for opinion pieces
21 September 2009

Where should the Signpost go from here?
17 August 2009

Welcome to the build-your-own edition of the Signpost
27 July 2009

Browsing the archives
1 June 2009

Writers needed
18 May 2009

Follow the Signpost with RSS and Twitter
30 March 2009

Reviewing books for the Signpost
23 March 2009

A new leaf
16 February 2009

From the editor: Getting back on track
3 January 2009

From the editor: 200th issue
24 November 2008

From the editor
8 November 2008

From the editor
22 September 2008

From the editor: Help wanted
18 August 2008

From the editor: Transparency
14 July 2008

From the editor: Transparency
7 July 2008

From the editor
23 June 2008

From the editor
2 May 2008

From the editor
14 April 2008

From the editor
13 March 2008

From the editor
18 February 2008

From the editor: New feature
28 January 2008

From the editor: A new weekly feature
14 January 2008

From the editor: Stepping in after delay
7 January 2008

From the editor: ArbCom elections, holiday publication
17 December 2007

From the editor: Interview with Florence Devouard
29 October 2007

From the editor: Brion Vibber interview
15 October 2007

From the editor: New feature
8 October 2007

From the editor
24 September 2007

From the editor: Reader survey
17 September 2007

From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales
10 September 2007

From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales
3 September 2007

From the editor: Another experiment and Wikimania
30 July 2007

From the editor: Filling in with a new feature
16 July 2007

From the editor
18 June 2007

From the editor
11 June 2007

From the editor
4 June 2007

From the editor
26 March 2007

From the editor
19 February 2007

From the editor: Holiday publication
18 December 2006

From the editor: New feature
11 December 2006

A note from the editor
28 August 2006

From the (temporary) editor
24 July 2006

From the editor: RSS returns
12 June 2006

From the editor: Technical difficulties
17 April 2006

From the editor: New weekly series
10 April 2006

From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales
13 February 2006

From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales
6 February 2006

From the editor: RSS feed
12 December 2005

From the editor: New weekly series
21 November 2005

From the editor: New features
14 November 2005

From the editor: Newsroom changes
7 November 2005

From the editor: Proposed Signpost Redesign
26 September 2005

Errors and omissions
29 August 2005

From the editor: Operations continued with temporary editor
15 August 2005

From the editor: Suspending operations
8 August 2005

From the editor: Help wanted with Wikimania coverage
1 August 2005

From the editor: A new feature
20 June 2005

From the editor: Happy to be back
23 May 2005

From the editor
16 May 2005

From the editor
9 May 2005

From the editor: New feature ideas
2 May 2005

From the editor
25 April 2005

From the editor: New features and plans during vacation
18 April 2005

From the editor: Help needed during upcoming vacation
11 April 2005

From the editor: Help wanted
17 January 2005

From the editor: Welcome to the Signpost!
10 January 2005

This issue is a bit more complicated to deal with, and as a result its solution is a bit less complete. But if you go to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series you can see a number of distinct series of articles. While these lists have been around for a while, they existed as embedded sidebar templates with inconsistent naming schemes, scattered randomly through the PrefixIndex of more than 80,000 pages, with a variety of formatting styles that made updating impractical. Now they use Module:Signpost data to automatically fetch articles from the indices that have been tagged with SignpostTagger, and display differently depending on where they're used (they still give a sidebar if transcluded in a Signpost article, and now present a readable list of articles if you go directly to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series/Paid editing.

In addition to the existing pages for each existing series, I came up with a few templates to auto-generate pages for a few dozen of the most-used based on Wegweiser's comprehensive tag analysis. These are on the series page as well. For example, if you want a list of every arbitration report, you can go to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Tag/arbitrationreport.

Like with the authors, the tags follow a certain distribution: while there are 519 tags in the module indices (props to Chris Troutman for much good work in the archives), only 357 of them appear on more than one article, and just 109 are used on more than 20. Currently there are 64 auto-generated tag pages, covering every tag with more than 39 uses; but we can always make more later – who knows.

Searching

There is a new template, at Template:Signpost/Search that allows you to easily search Signpost articles. Previously, finding stuff in back issues was difficult; even if a search was restricted with a prefix, it would return stuff from anywhere beginning with Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost, including newsroom archives, drafts, documentation pages, and old submissions. With a little magic (and a little hideous regex), though, it is now possible to search only in actual articles. Give it a shot:


Miscellaneous spelunking

Various other random back-office issues have been addressed, as documented in the annals of Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/Technical. These include a heroic effort by Jonesey95 to fix several thousand linter errors and missing </div>s, and the unearthing of yet more bizarre stuff. For instance there are a number of phantom articles, like this one, which was written in 2011, never published, and never actually linked to from a Signpost issue until January 2023. And two redlinked articles in the indices for 2006 and 2013 were retroactively created in 2016 as a prank, then deleted in 2017. Huh?

Anyway, if you are interested in monotonous tasks very few people care about – which you are, let's be real, we are Wikipedia editors – there are about five hundred articles from 2015 to 2020 that need to be given tags with SPT, and any help is appreciated.


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  • That author page feature is pretty cool! And you even did it retroactively for lapsed contributors like me. Not sure if that's for the best given the embarrassing columns I know I wrote back then... —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 05:06, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Have you changed how the headlines are displayed on Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost? I use the "Use a black background with green text" gadget, and can no longer see the headlines on that page unless I right-click-and-highlight. Usually this is cased by someone setting a font to black. DuncanHill (talk) 08:31, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @DuncanHill: Define "recently"? The headlines on that page are indeed styled color: black, via a CSS signpost-snippet-title class defined in the page's TemplateStyles. But they've been that way for a good long while now.
    The only thing that's changed "recently" (and by that I mean, over 6 months but less than a year ago) was when TheDJ moved that styling into Template:Signpost/snippet/styles.css. Prior to that edit, it was done via a <span style="color:black">...</span> wrapped directly around the headline. It's possible the gadget handled the attribute-based styling differently than the current <span class="signpost-snippet-title">...</span> TemplateStyles class, though it applies the same color: black to the text. But we'd have to be talking about something that changed eight months ago, for that to be the culprit. Is that "recently"?
    If not, then it's worth considering that the entire site very recently changed its whole appearance; if the issue you're seeing started only days or weeks ago, rather than months, then perhaps the new skin is at least partly to blame? (Or, it's also possible changes were made to the gadget itself recently, in response to the new skin, that may have affected how it handles the Signpost contents styling.) FeRDNYC (talk) 13:33, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    The format of the all headings from core has recently changed, perphaps the "Use a black background with green text" gadget has not been updated to account for those changes or needs additionally rules now, to account for the signpost ?? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 13:36, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @TheDJ and DuncanHill: That's what I'm thinking. Still... the main site headings get their color: #000 from a h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {...} rule in the global skin CSS, same as they always have. It seems like it would be possible to use standard heading tags for the contents-page headlines, with the existing <span class="signpost-snippet-title"> inside that. (Just like the site headings, which are an <hN> with a <span class="mw-heading"> inside it.)
    The TemplateStyles can still style the inner span as needed, but there's no need to apply any color styling because it'll already be inherited from the parent <hN>. That should allow the green-on-black gadget, or any other restyling tool, to handle those chunks of text the same way they do every other heading on the site. Would probably make everything more accessible for screen readers and the like, too, if each headline is an actual heading.
    We'd have to __NOTOC__ the page, of course. (Be kind of cool if we could not, since the new skin has the TOC in the sidebar where it won't mess up the page layout, but for other skins it'd look bad.) FeRDNYC (talk) 14:12, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Apologies — I have no idea where I got the idea that you said "recently" in your initial comment, but it appears that was entirely my imagination. FeRDNYC (talk) 13:38, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @FeRDNYC: I use Monobook, and always have, so presumably not the new skin. DuncanHill (talk) 13:50, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is some high quality technical work! The author pages are particularly nice to have. Thank you to the team! —Ganesha811 (talk) 11:54, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I may be responsible for some of technical mess, I revamped the look and feel of the Signpost back in 2015. This is also where the tagging initiative started off—we were looking at all of the times we'd used the "Related articles" template and thought to ourselves, gee it sure would be nice if we generate these automatically. Ya'll should try out Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Templates/Voter by the way. I built it in that era, and it's legitimately very useful reader engagement tool IMO, but I see that it hasn't been used since 2018. ResMar 20:17, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Messy or not, you gave me a sturdy set of shoulders to stand on when building these features, which is all I could ever ask for -- hats off to you for all of that! ;^) jp×g 02:00, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Now, now, it wasn't impossible to find published articles in the past, you just had to use these neat things called "categories". And only be looking for articles from between 2005 and 2015. And it would also help if you knew what year the article was published and the column title. Okay, the new system is better, I said it. Liz Read! Talk! 22:06, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very cool; great work everyone! — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk; please {{ping}} me in replies) 22:38, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, it would be a neat graph: Uwappa (talk) 17:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/From_the_editor