Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Formatting

For a quick reference guide, see the formatting cheatsheet

The Signpost takes advantage of CSS styling to increase the readability and visual attractiveness of the articles that we publish. This page serves as a visual reference on how we use the various templates and techniques available to us to achieve this, and is a recommended resource for anyone that wishes to publish an article in the Signpost.

The formatting of articles published in the Signpost is complex, so beginning an article manually is heavily discouraged. Instead you should use one of our pre-formatter tools. If you are writing a regular feature you can start the article from a button in the newsroom. For instance, hitting the Start article button for the News and notes section will, as of writing, generate the following code:

<noinclude>
{{Signpost draft}}
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-header|||}}
</noinclude>

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-header-v2
 |{{{1|(Your article's descriptive subtitle here)}}}
 |By [[User:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|]]
 |{{subst:#time:j F Y|{{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Issue|4}}}}
}}
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2}}
{{Signpost inline image|image=File:Gypful.jpg|caption=Example inline image and caption.}}

===Lead story one===
The story begins here.

===Lead story two===
The story begins here.

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2}}

===Brief notes===
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2|image=File:T-Rex Modell.JPG|size=300px|caption=Example filler image and caption.}}
*'''New user-groups''': The [[meta:Affiliations Committee|Affiliations Committee]] announced the approval of this week's newest [[meta:Wikimedia movement affiliates|Wikimedia movement affiliate]], the .
*'''New administrators''': ''The Signpost'' welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators,
*'''Milestones''': The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this week:

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}

<noinclude>
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-end-v2}}
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-comments-end
 |
 |{{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Issue|1}}
 |{{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Issue|5}}
}}
</noinclude>
</nowiki>

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: ===Introduction to layout===.

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 {{Signpost inline image|image=File:Foo.jpg|caption=Your caption.}}.

To place an image in the right-hand column, as appears here, use the {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2|image=File:Foo.svg|caption=Some caption}} template. By default these images are of size 300x300px, but this will not be an ideal size for all images. You can specify a manual size using the size parameter. For instance, the image at right was generated with:

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2|image=File:Macaca nigra self-portrait large.jpg|caption=A filler image generated using the code at left.|size=300px}}

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:

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler poll-v2|option1=Yes|votepage=Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Voter/Issues/Test Poll/Votes|option2=No|question=An open poll.}}

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 Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Voter/ sub-domain. Note that polls with fewer than ten responses will not display results—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 {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Quote|Your quote}}. For example:

If your quote is sufficiently lengthy it makes visual sense to "pop" it out of the column. If you use {{Signpost inline quote|Your quote|source=Attribution}} your quote will take up the full 800px of horizontal space:

[Talkpages] have been around from the very beginning, but having never really substantially improved in almost a decade and a half they are today often regarded as something of a technical black sheep. There's already been one failed initiative to replace them, LiquidThreads, and another effort, Flow, has now been underway for some time, with a small number of pages currently serving as testbeds on the English Wikipedia and elsewhere. Communication using talk-pages is conceptually easy, if often messy in execution. Yet few talkpages are widely watched, and therefore, read, and so despite efforts like feedback request service there remain only a couple of on-wiki discussion points with an audience wide enough to get a point across: the village pumps come to mind, as does Jimmy Wales' talk page.

The greatest advantage of the talk pages is the fact that, being the basic venue for inter-user communication, they are accessible to all Wikipedians. The greatest disadvantage is one of presentation: lengthy posts are quickly snowballed by other lengthy posts in response, some of which are insightful, many of which are not. The lack of a visual distinction between the original author of the post and replies thereof, the blowback of the community's antiquated discussion model, causes talk page discussions to quickly degenerate into unreadability. The first and last few replies in a comment chain are far and away the most important ones, no matter the weight of their actual content, for little reason more than that they are what is most immediately read.

A useful property of the {{Signpost inline quote}} template is that it interacts nicely with sidebar content, as demonstrated here.

We will always have undisclosed paid editors on Wikipedia, just as we have undisclosed followers of various belief systems, and editors with undisclosed educational, health, and professional backgrounds. Our strongest defense is to adopt notability and referencing standards comparable to those of our peer Wikipedias: only a handful of these articles would have made it through the local equivalent of page curation on most Wikipedias. We should also find ways to ensure that there are transparent and respected channels for article subjects, whether people, organizations, or businesses, to communicate their concerns about the content we publish about them. Even after 15 years, we're still not very good at this. Again, we can learn from our peer projects to find out what has worked for them.

You can also create a right-hanging quote using the {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler quote-v2|Your quote}} template, as at right.

Graphs & Visualisations

It's easy to embed a graph or chart within a Signpost report in an inline manner using the {{Graph:Chart}} template. To learn more about graphing check out the template's documentation. Inline content is generally 800px wide, so if you want to take full advantage of the space you are allotted set width=800.

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

To use charts in the filler gap—generally preferable, unless you have a large visualization or data-set—use the general purpose {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2|1=Your stuff|caption=A caption}} template. This templates allows for embedding any content on the right-hand side in a flexible manner—not just charts! Filler content is 300px by default, so use the parameter width=300 in this case. As elsewhere, the filler frame template also supports a caption, an option taken advantage of at right.

Here's another example of the filler frame template being taken advantage of: this time to generate a right-hanging list. This bit was generated with {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2|1=...the list...}}. Why is 1= included? This has to do with a long-standing bug (source?) that causes complex templates to fail if a numerical parameter is not included.

Tags & related articles

The Signpost has been in publication for a long time—since 2005—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 {{Signpost series|type=inline|tag=your tag}} template. These are generally placed at the very end of a section or article. For instance, with tag=paidediting 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.

For more Signpost coverage on paidediting see our paidediting series.

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 {{Signpost series|type=sidebar-v2|tag=gendergap|seriestitle=Gender gap|break_date=March 1 2011}}. The tag is the tag to be used while seriestitle is the name of the tag as it will appear in the template. The break_date 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—In the media, News and notes, Technology report, others—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 {{Signpost brief filler image|image=|caption=|size=}} 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 {{anchor|Linkname}} template, and then link to it with [[Foo/Bar#Linkname]]. 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 (<small>[[User:Resident Mario|R]]</small>, 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: line-height:1.6em; font-size:1em; font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
• Article title: font-family: Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;font-size: 190%; line-height: 130%;
• Article recurring segment titletext-shadow: 0px -1px 0px #EEE; color:#777; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif; text-transform:uppercase; font-weight:bold; font-size:110%; line-height:100%;
• 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:Wikipedia Signpost/Author. Bylines should be formatted like this:

By [[User:Ktrout65|Kilgore Trout]], [[User:Cordwainer Bird|Cordwainer Bird]], and [[User:Gmontag451|Gmontag451]]

Or this:

By [[User:Ktrout65|Kilgore Trout]] and [[User:Gmontag451|Gmontag451]]

Note that the field begins with uppercased By , separates individual authors with commas, and uses the

• 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 ~JP×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. [https://diff.wikimedia.org/author/chris-koerner/ Chris Koerner] can be linked as [[wmfblog:author/chris-koerner|Chris Koerner]].
• 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