If you'd like your WikiProject featured in an upcoming WikiProject report, feel free to list it here. This is also the place to leave short announcements regarding upcoming events, collaborations, elections, task forces, new or revived projects, and other information for the "WikiProject News" subsection. Note that these requests are entirely advisory, and may or may not be used in future reports. Please do not "support" or "oppose" individual requests, and keep requests short and concise.
Please note that WikiProject News Sidebar requests go below.
Interviews
WikiProject Saints, the only project which to my knowledge has gotten a barnstar from an outsider as a project. And, of course, considering it just declared indpendence, Wikipedia:WikiProject Kosovo might be the most timely. John Carter (talk) 19:17, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:WikiProject Textile Arts nearly died and came back to life. Originally begun in early 2007, by the start of December it had dwindled to just two active members. For a view of how much it's revived, here's its March newsletter (featured pictures, good articles, DYKs, and a featured portal drive). Durova 09:19, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized might be a nice success-story to include in some edition of the Signpost. Various gnomes have hacked away at this backlog ever since bots like Alaibot started populating it a year and a half ago. Of course, this is a never-ending task but it's an important one and the backlog typically hovers around 2000 articles (compared to 10 times that a year ago). Pichpich (talk) 13:42, 29 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProject Long Island. Theres tons of things that happened in WP:LINY that would be great for the signpost. Nothing444 13:12, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Semi-active; did not respond to request for interview.--mono 01:16, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProject Environment. It has quite a bit of members and quality of articles (5 FA, 20 GA, 3 GAN). It has a task force that has attracted an English course in University of Kansas to improve environment-related sections in Wikipedia articles. OhanaUnited 13:21, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
ScheduledWikiProject U.S. Roads. There have been a recent surge of good articles, making a total of 12 featured articles, 2 featured lists, 1 featured picture, 2 featured topics, 9 A-Class articles, and 117 Good articles. There are five main users that should be interviewed, and they are Rschen7754, Scott5114, O, Kéiryn, and NE2. --CG 03:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Update: USRD currently has 29 featured articles, 6 featured lists, and 369 GAs. Its extensive system of sub-projects and article improvement metrics make it unique within the community. —Scott5114↗[EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 13:27, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProject Comedy - It contains over 50 featured works, over 200 GAs, and has just under 50 members. ISD (talk) 08:43, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProject Horror. Established in 2006, this project has been given renewed life recently and hopes to be able to contribute and improve articles within our scope.
Wikipedia:WikiProject Algae, a brand new project intended to cover a very large and neglected area of biological diversity on Wikipedia. A mention would be nice, as there is no single or specific project where interested phycologists might be lurking. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:57, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
ScheduledWikiProject Chicago, an immensely successful project with 44 FA's and 188 GA's, which take up most of the space within articles in its scope. No coordinator, but there are some very active members that would be suitable for interview. To leave a comment on this, please respond at User talk:Belugaboy. BelugaboyTalk to Me! 00:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:WikiProject Musical Theatre is a project that was active in the past but has grown dormant. Articles on musicals often accumulate fancruft, and there is much work to be done on the project if editors would like to help out. Leave a message on the talk page there, and we can discuss how you can help! -- Ssilvers (talk) 02:47, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Putting in WikiProject News Sidebar.--mono (talk) 23:46, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Doing...--mono (talk) 23:46, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Doing... I'll try to feature a bot in the news sidebar each week. We could probably devote an entire article to bots at a later date. -Mabeenot (talk) 05:50, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Cool. And yes, we probably could. Rd232talk 11:36, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
WP:BIRD Large project which just reached 60 FAs; major contributors include Casliber and Jimfbleak, two of the most prolific featured article writers. There is no coordinator and about a dozen-odd highly active users, so if this project is scheduled I suggest a query be made on the talk page. —innotata 23:47, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Sidebar News
Remember to keep requests about a sentence long and avoid sounding over-promotional.
Schedule
Upcoming articles and authors are listed here. Before adding a new article to the schedule, please check the archive to ensure it is not a repeat and discuss the proposed schedule change with the other current authors in the discussion section below.
One answer to your question is simply that there was not enough volunteer labor to write the article. Anyone can still cover the story. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:49, 27 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As someone who participated in the case, I don't believe I should be writing about it. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 03:22, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Front page
As long as everyone is complaining, I might as well voice my own gripe. In the good old days (yeah, former glory, wooden ships and iron men) the front page was a list of headlines, or rather sections and subsections. It was easy to read. This year, half the text is superimposed on a background photo. This degrades both the photo and the words, making them less easy and pleasant to read. It was a brave try, but it didn't work, at least for me and I'd like to click an option to show the old version, without pictures. Or words all below, above, or beside the picture; whatever. Jim.henderson (talk) 23:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I made a similar note above. The two pages that Bri linked to are fine. It's Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost that has been a problem for a few months. It can't possibly comply with our accessibility policies, for one thing. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:53, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm trying to improve the layout/readability. I got something decent ish here I think, but I can't for the life of my find how the hell to adjust padding/margins so that things don't overlap with each other. I'd get rid of text shadows on the In the media etc. sections, but that would mean playing with the live version since there's no CSS sandbox. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:01, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the only way to make the text accessible with arbitrary images is to separate it the text from the images. Black on translucent gray on an unknown image background is probably not accessible. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:03, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The latter version with more details as given by Bri is my preference. But either of these no-picture front page versions is better than what we've been getting the past couple months. Jim.henderson (talk) 09:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I too prefer the pictureless version. But only because the picture-full version is badly aligned and legibility is compromised. I'm not, in principle, opposed to pictures. But the layout needs improvement. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:06, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
agreed; i think pictures are good and well, but i also don't like that the text goes over them. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 22:14, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Big Pictures are a distracting, less than good (trying to say that gently) use of space requiring extra scrolling and making skimming very difficult, so the amt of time I care to spend on it is less- to un- informative, imo. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:47, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can you post a screenshot of this? I tested it in a couple browsers when I wrote the styles for this page and it doesn't look like they overlap to me. Here is what I am seeing: jp×g🗯️ 06:57, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See File:Screen Shot 2024-05-13 at 5.51.36 .png. Note text obscured by images, images that are not aligned, black-on-black text, images that overlap. This is in Firefox for Mac, the latest version. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:54, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The blocks overlap with narrower browser window widths (or increased zoom levels which effectively narrows the window width). isaacl (talk) 05:55, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On my screen, the opposite is true. If I narrow my browser window so that the content area is less than 700 pixels wide, I get the two-column view shown in JPxG's image. If I use my normal window width, I see the three overlapping columns of images. I have a 13-inch laptop screen, so my window width is not unusually large. Both sets of images show black text on a black background. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:29, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My apologies; I didn't narrow the window far enough to see the two-column layout. Yes, there is a middle area where the blocks overlap. With a wider window size, they stop overlapping. isaacl (talk) 14:41, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Over the course of the last year or so I put substantial effort into repairing some of the technical debt in the Signpost codebase, and fixing decade-old broken features, updating the indices, et cetera. I think I did have done pretty good job of most of it (e.g. the module actually works, articles have images, there's a frontend that shows working preview cards and allows Signpost articles to be linked on other websites, the scripts integrate a wider variety of information into the module which can be used freely, author and subheading metadata is saved and accessible, et cetera). I also wrote Wegweiser, which allowed us to actually use the tagging system and module which had been developed most of the way to completion in 2014-15 and then abandoned. I was basically fine with nobody caring about most of this, because I was not doing it for the glory, just because it had to be done at some point. The newsroom display and the next-issue mockup is pretty much completely automated at this point, which eliminates the previously difficult-and-unreliable process of manually updating it. There are a lot of things like this, which I am pretty happy about.
However, in the last few months, I have become convinced that fixing technical issues at the Signpost is not a really good use of my time, primarily because a gigantic proportion of said time is wasted on bureaucratic issues seemingly for no reason. For example, over the course of 2023, I cleaned up a bunch of old accidental redirects from typos, unused shortcuts and the like; in January of this year I deleted one with no incoming links and no pageviews (the PrefixIndex being crammed with unused junk pages makes it harder for scripts and queries to work properly). But the speedy deletion was contested, and it was demanded that I go through a formal RfD discussion, which took an excruciating three months and was finally closed at the end of March. The discussion was eventually closed with a consensus to delete, but three months of time that I could have spent fixing stuff, I spent sitting on my butt doing nothing, because I had to wait for a formal committee process to approve it.
This wasn't even the first time this had happened: in January 2023 I had also been forced to stop my cleanup efforts for several weeks because somebody objected to a couple speedy deletions, and demanded I file individual MfDs for each of the seventeen unused redirects and misnamed templates. So I did, and I waited, and they were all deleted: but I still had to stop working for a month. There is nobody I can send an invoice to for this. The time is just lost.
In general, the impression I get is that the time I spend working on technical issues is considered worthless -- in fact, the more of it I do, the more worthless it's considered, because that means the amount of work I'm willing to do for free is even higher. This means that people feel comfortable doing things that break stuff, or intiating gigantic timesink processes, and cause dozens of hours of pointless busywork, and they don't care, because my labor is worth $0 -- and I can't raise the price, or get people to stop buying it, so the only option I have is to stop selling it entirely, so I have mostly stopped doing technical Signpost work unless it's strictly necessary to prevent things from breaking. I would very much appreciate if anybody was willing to help with this stuff -- I would be glad to give some guidance to anyone who wants to lend a hand, and there's a lot of difficult and tedious work that needs to get done.
I'm aware that the front page design has some issues, e.g. it uses shadow instead of stroke or outline (because of browser compatibility issues iirc but maybe that's changed); opacity and padding need some work; I have a big page of notes on improvements I was planning to make some months ago. Most crucially, it looks kind of ass on mobile. The thing Headbomb posted looks pretty good and I think it would be nice.
When I was trying to figure out how to format images for article cards, I had a significant challenge with aspect ratios. Basically: if you go to a bunch of randomly selected news websites (wapo, sacramento bee, the telegraph, le monde etc) you will see that they have a bunch of images for their articles. These have some landscape ratio (2:1, 3:2, 16:9, etc). That's all good and cool -- but if you look at, for example, an article or two you'll see that there isn't just one image for each article: there's a header image, which has the flattened landscape ratio, but also a sidebar thumbnail, which for each article is a 1:1 square. Adding any kind of metadata to articles requires a ton of extra code in four separate programs (Wegweiser, in the Signpost Publishing Script, in Module:Signpost, and also in the SignpostTagger) all of which interact with the modules. For article pictures, since every image we want to use for an article doesn't come in a pretty correct-aspect-ratio version, this means we have to have a scaling factor, x offset, and y offset (in addition to image link, author name, and license text). Since I didn't want to do this gigantic ton of extra code twice (see, allowing different aspect ratios for images would require a scaling factor/X and Y offset for the 2:3 and also for the 1:1 and God forbid somebody wants a 3:2 portrait version!) -- I just said, you know, whatever, I will just have there be a single set of params for 1:1 images -- then on the main page for the Signpost we can just have text overlaying the bottom part of it so that, in actual practice, we are still dealing with a 3:2 or 16:9 or other landscape-ratio image (because this is what all of the news sites I looked at seem to have, and it looks pretty good) but we just have the lower part of the image less visible because of the overlay. Anyway, this was the idea at the time -- you can see the implementation is not perfect. jp×g🗯️ 06:51, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Navigation bugged, Comix?
Hiya! I noticed that the second-most recent "Comix" is not connected to the most recent one. When you click "previous comix" on the new one, it sends you back two comixes ago, and the second-most recent one does not link to the new one. I don't really know how to fix that, but I wanted to make editors that might know how to fix it aware! EdoAug (talk) 18:30, 16 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Bizarre but true -- fixed now, thanks for the tip. jp×g🗯️ 04:34, 19 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
View stats for 20-7
Do we still record pageviews for every issue? I'm curious to see how the various columns performed, especially the Special report (no pun intended)! Oltrepier (talk) 14:25, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Done
