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

From the editor

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

A new goose on the roost
31 October 2022

Rise of the machines, or something
1 August 2022

More articles

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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In this issue

4 February 2023

From the editor

News and notes

Section 230

Disinformation report

Discuss this story

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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 ... wrapped directly around the headline. It's possible the gadget handled the attribute-based styling differently than the current ... 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 (talk • contribs) 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  inside that. (Just like the site headings, which are an <hN> with a  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:
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Uwappa (talk) 17:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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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

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

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