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

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 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!