Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Formatting

Do you want to do all of that manually? Of course not! Articles should be started using newsroom buttons, using script assistance, or using irregular desk controls. This will minimize setup headaches both for you and for the managing editors that have to repair draft pages' formatting before publication. Everything except for the article title and the byline is filled out for you automatically when you start the article correctly.

Images
Sub-article headlines are level three headlines, generated with the following likely familiar bit of wikicode:.

High-resolution, wide-format images placed before article headings are a glossy way of making your article stand out. You can add one to your article using the code.

To place an image in the right-hand column, as appears here, use the  template. By default these images are of size, but this will not be an ideal size for all images. You can specify a manual size using the  parameter. For instance, the image at right was generated with:

Polls
Articles can have multiple subheadings. This help keeps organization neat.

The Signpost allows polls to be embedded into its articles. A polls creates interactive content for our users and makes the story livelier, whilst allowing both us and our readers themselves to gauge community consensus on an issue or idea. The poll at right was created with:

In order to work around the limitations of MediaWiki software users that choose to respond to a poll are actually saving a preformatted string to the votepage; the cumulative results of these individual edits to the votepage are then arithmetically tallied (via Lua) and displayed for public consumption within the pages of the Signpost. Setting up a votepage is easy: create your poll template and save the page, then follow the link in the error message to create the votepage. For organizational purposes, votepages should be placed in the  sub-domain. Note that polls with fewer than ten responses will not display results&mdash;they will display a countdown of progress towards those ten votes instead.

Quotes
The Signpost uses its own, slightly modified quotation template. To insert a quote use. For example:

If your quote is sufficiently lengthy it makes visual sense to "pop" it out of the column. If you use  your quote will take up the full   of horizontal space:

A useful property of the  template is that it interacts nicely with sidebar content, as demonstrated here.

You can also create a right-hanging quote using the  template, as at right.

Graphs & Visualisations
Here's an example of the filler frame template being taken advantage of: this time to generate a right-hanging list. This bit was generated with. Why is  included? This has to do with a long-standing bug (source?) that causes complex templates to fail if a numerical parameter is not included.

While the graphs module is offline, only static graphics (files) can be used.

Tags & related articles
The Signpost has been in publication for a long time&mdash;since 2005&mdash;and has written many words on many topics. To help readers explore previous Signpost coverage you can call out their attention to a particular article tag using the  template. These are generally placed at the very end of a section or article. For instance, with  you can end your article with the tag-link below. Tags are a complex topic with their own methodology: to learn more see our Index page.

You can also point to a tag series in a more inline manner using another style available in the series template. The box at right was generated with. The  is the tag to be used while   is the name of the tag as it will appear in the template. The  parameter is the date at which the template will stop listing Signpost stories. If no such date is specified the template will list every article with the specified tag on it, but you must be careful with doing so, as later stories will extend this template and warp the formatting of the page on which it is being used. For topical or highly active topics, using a limiting date is highly recommended: the rest of the stories will be hidden in the expandable "see more" menu. Note that stories are listed back to front: so the oldest stories go to the top and things proceed chronologically from there.

Briefly

 * News in brief: Signpost stories in regular reports&mdash;In the media, News and notes, Technology report, others&mdash;often or usually have a section "in brief" where small but nevertheless notable news is touched upon. The formatting of this section escapes a bit from that of the other sections, but will be handled for you when you start a story out of the newsroom.
 * Images in brief: Images can appear in news in brief: to use them here use the  template. An example appears at right.
 * Anchors: Oftentimes with news in brief you will want to go and link back to a brief item sometime in the future, perhaps when the issue gets significant coverage again and the previous coverage is still notable and useful. To do so go back and drop into that story an  template, and then link to it with  . As, for instance, here.
 * Citing previous Signpost coverage: When citing another article in the issue being written, use the formulation "(see Signpost coverage"). When referring to articles in previous editions (more common), the format "(see previous Signpost coverage)" is preferred.
 * Asserting authorship: In the case of Signpost pages with multiple authors you can (but aren't required to) make use of a small byline callout (, for instance) placed at the end of the piece to demonstrate writer's ownership of a particular section. R

Technical details

 * Main header and footer are 100% page wide
 * We use margins that are relative to the viewport width (vw) for margins of width. This makes sure they don't take up too much space on mobile devices. Very old devices will ignore them, falling back to full width.
 * First indentation level is at 2vw. Used in header and by main canvas
 * Second indentation level is at 4vw (2 + 2). Used by textual content (but not the article header) contained within the main canvas.
 * The main canvas is max 80em wide and centered (usually gives enough space for the sidebar)
 * The main canvas includes the article headers, the textual content, and the sidebar
 * The width of the main textual content is a maximum of 46em.
 * Some elements are enhanced with non-prefixed flex box. Browsers that don't support this, fallback to defaults, that are readable, though perhaps a little less pretty.

Styles

 * Plaintext:
 * Article title:
 * Article recurring segment title
 * Article byline:
 * Colours:
 * Font families
 * Classes
 * signpost-article-title (#signpost-article-title) (h2 inside of article header
 * signpost-byline (block underneath h2 of article header
 * signpost-author (the author(s) inside the byline block of article header.
 * signpost-segment (the recurring segment that this article is a part of in article header
 * signpost-article (all article content. started by article start and ended by article end.
 * signpost-sidebar (elements positioned in the sidebar next to the article content)
 * signpost-article-footer (all elements underneath an article that are specific to an edition (toc, comments, next/prev) and part of article comments end.
 * signpost-comments (#comments) inside the above
 * signpost-succession (issue segment pager) inside the above
 * signpost-inthisissue inside the above
 * signpost-ticker inside the above

Author metadata and bylines
The author fields of header templates are intended to give clean metadata, in the style of cite web. This allows Module:Signpost to work correctly, and for author pages to be generated at Wikipedia Signpost/Author. Bylines should be formatted like this:

Or this:

Note that the field begins with uppercased, separates individual authors with commas, and uses the Oxford comma for the last "and" if there are more than two. Here is how the bylines should be attributed:
 * One person should be credited with one name, under one byline, with one string of text for their name, i.e. there should not be "K. Trout65" and "Ktrout65".
 * Do not use text styling for bylines, or have multiple links. User:JPxG can be linked as JPxG, or maybe jpxg, but not jp×g or  ~ J P  ×  G 


 * If someone has written for the Signpost under their IRL name, their byline should be that, i.e. there should not be "Kilgore Trout" and "Ktrout".
 * If not, their byline should be their username.


 * No parentheticals, comma phrases or anything besides their name: "Kilgore Trout" and not "Kilgore Trout, Executive Coordination Liaison, Department of Situations and Circumstances".
 * If someone's occupation or title is relevant to their authorship, it shoud be provided in a parenthetical note at the beginning of the article: "Kilgore Trout is the Executive Coordination Liaison at the Department of Situations and Circumstances".


 * "User:" should not be in the link text, i.e. "Smallbones" and not "User:Smallbones".
 * Bylines should not contain external links. Note that most Wikimedia sites (and most wikis) can be linked to by prefixes at Special:Interwiki, i.e.  can be linked as.
 * There should only be one variant of the capitalization. This does not have to be the same as the username (i.e. many people stylize their usernames as all-lowercase), but there can only be one for each person.
 * In the case of official statements by organizations, the organization should be credited:
 * "Wikimedia Foundation"


 * In the case of multiple authorship that makes it difficult to attribute individual authors, the following may be used:
 * "English Wikipedia editors"
 * "French Wikipedia editors"


 * In the case of Signpost articles with multiple authorship, the following byline will be used:
 * "Staff"

Templates

 * Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-article-start-v2
 * Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2
 * Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2
 * Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-article-end-v2