Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/From the team

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From the team

We heard zoomers liked fortnights: the biweekly Signpost rides again

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By JPxG
Each vertical line indicates a single issue, with colour showing how much time passed since the last.
From the quick weeklies of sultry #7798D8 to the dry spells of balmy #B02D81... we haven't died yet!

Above, you can see (and scroll across) a beautiful timeline of every interval between the 645 Signpost issues, from 2005-01-10 to today. Notice anything? Besides the tasteful graphic design, I mean.

Yes, that's right: this used to be a weekly rag! Not always – there was a 102-day drought between February and June 2017 (and more recently a 63-day skip between April and June 2021). But the average interval over the whole period has been a little over ten days: with a couple of exceptions, the Signpost maintained a weekly schedule until 2016, when it switched to fortnightly publication. That lasted, more or less, until the "death knell" of 2018, when rumours of the Signpost's demise flourished; and it seemed to be in terminal decline, and we arrived at a sedate monthly schedule.

But things have been speeding up lately. We had a couple of thick issues in 2022 – so thick, in fact, that they broke the tubes and we had to frantically poke around in the source code of display templates designed to top out at 18 articles per issue. Take the "July" issue (published 1 August – yeesh!), with 22 articles in it. Not only is this too much for the templates, but we suspect it's a little much for the readers ... even for a Wikipedian some walltexts are too high.

So anyway, we're going to take a shot at running the presses every two weeks, until we either run out of stuff to say (i.e. never), get bored of it, or become too employed to commit to a biweekly schedule (or is it semiweekly? It turns out nobody actually knows).

In other news, editor-in-chief JPxG fails to finish his sentences so gets them finished by his copyeditor is embarking on a deep odyssey into the deepest recesses of Signpost history to properly format old articles, fix broken templates, and remove random detritus accumulated over the course of 20 years of publication. So far this has involved one BRFA, 14 Python scripts, 19 years of updated module metadata, 426 speedy deletions, and several thousand article reformatting edits. He claims he will have something to show for these efforts – by next issue, probably. In the meantime check out the single talk page for this issue!

Despite the rush to get this published, we have quite the full issue. Some regular columns don't appear, but not to worry: those columns are remaining monthly, so will appear every other issue. So, welcome to this [ NEW ERA | QUICKLY ABANDONED EXPERIMENT ] (delete as appropriate), from all of us at the Signpost!

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  • Thank you for doing biweekly! The Signpost makes my day! Lectrician1 (talk) 02:19, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Surprised_pikachu_meme.png is appropriate when I saw the mass message in my Talk page. Too used to monthly release. But this is a welcomed change. Hope that there is sufficient content in the pipeline to sustain the biweekly cadence! – robertsky (talk) 02:22, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • At first, I thought the Talk page alert was for the weekly Tech News. What a delightful surprise to see a biweekly edition of the Signpost! A great way to start the new year! Thank you Team! — WILDSTARTALK 05:33, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I well remember when the Signpost was weekly. Glad to see it going more often again, and I was certainly happy that the rumors of its demise were greatly exaggerated. Seraphimblade Talk to me 05:44, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for doing some great work with the Signpost currently! Zarasophos (talk) 08:01, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a healthy way for a project like this to evolve, I think. It's incredibly impressive how the Signpost was weekly for so many years, I cannot even imagine it. It doesn't feel sustainable to me. There's no shame in a slower or irregular publication schedule for a volunteer publication like this; I'm just glad to see it continue to exist as long as the Wikipedia Community does. A biweekly schedule would be very impressive and I fully believe you can do it. I'm looking forward to see this on my watchpage every other week, and I wish you all the best of luck <3 ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 10:43, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I thought the Signpost notification was broken because it was the middle of the month. Looking forward to more issues! Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:23, 16 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well, as I understand it, it's only fortnightly from 1 February to 1 March. We shall see. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:37, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Are you going to change the message at the bottom, "WANT THE LATEST SIGNPOST DELIVERED TO YOUR TALK PAGE EVERY MONTH?", or wait a little to see if this sticks? :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Donald Albury (talk • contribs) 14:45, 17 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • As long you all don't burn out, then this is certainly good news! :D –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 05:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I prefer the term semimonthly. No ambiguity in its meaning and the meaning is obvious from the word itself (semi-, half; monthly, self-evident). "Fortnightly" requires knowledge of what the word fortnight means, which is falling out of use. Axem Titanium (talk) 23:19, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Biweekly (which is used in the article title) is actually much clearer than semimonthly. But since we're supposed to be an encyclopedia, using fortnightly might further the education mission by teaching people the meaning of the word. Intothatdarkness 17:01, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Biweekly could mean twice a week or once every two weeks. That's intractable ambiguity for me. Axem Titanium (talk) 22:17, 20 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Biweekly in standard usage in the US is every two weeks (very common payroll term). Or we could just try something totally novel and say "every two weeks." Intothatdarkness 14:33, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • One of the benefits is the thinner bundle of paper dropped on my porch, taking fewer days to work my way through. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:59, 26 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Love The Signpost. Antrocent (♫♬) 01:22, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]


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