The Signpost has been in continuous weekly publication on the English Wikipedia since its foundation in early 2005 by future (now well-former) Board chairman Michael Snow. And over more than a decade of weekly publication we have accumulated an incredibly lengthy and detailed record about the issues, controversies, successes, and failures of the English Wikipedia community and the movement at large.
The movement has advanced almost incomprehensibly far since then; today the Wikimedia Foundation employs 280+ staffers running the fifth most visited website in the world. And no one's kept better track of the progress than the Signpost has. The contents of the Signpost archive contain the most extensive record available anywhere or to anyone of the things that have mattered and continue to matter to the community, and by browsing the Signpost archives editors can familiarize themselves with any and all of the things that matter in the community, from VisualEditor to semi-protection to hoax-making to editcountitis. Even things that most have forgotten about: for instance, how many remember that recently-retired vice president of engineering and long-time Wikipedian Erik Möller was working on a "Wikidata" concept all the way back in 2005 (we do)? How many of us have ever heard of nofollow (we have)?
Yet for all of its richness the Signpost archives are rarely used. Searching the archives for information on what you want is a pain, and since the results will be returned out of order it is the onus of the person doing the search to figure out what happened in what order. While doing research for a story I am, by way of the effort that I must make in reconstructing sequences of events through the Signpost archives, reminded of why hardly anyone ever does it. Articles are written and read, then archived and never heard from again; yet there is a rich wealth of information that the community could potentially make use of, a decade's worth of publications informing who we are and where we came from that is just too hard to pick apart to be of any use to anyone.
We at the Signpost have been hard at work over the past few months building up a systematic way to change that.
Though the technical framework is now almost complete, the bulk of the content work remains to be done. Before we can develop our initiative any further we need input from you, our readers, on what these tags actually are. A lot of things have happened over the decade and we don't pretend to know all of them; for this reason we need your help coming up with as comprehensive a list of tags as possible. It's imperative that, before we begin, we have as complete a list as possible of all of the important things that have happened on Wikipedia—and so we are asking for your help defining just what those things are.
Help us out! Head over to our Etherpad and start adding your thoughts to it as much and as soon as you can!
We're not ready yet to reveal the full technical details of the project, which are still in alpha and under constant revision. But you can look at some early results nonetheless by trying some of the following links. Try a few yourself!
— Resident Mario, Signpost associate editor
Discuss this story
This is great work, Resident Mario! It would be nice if this functionality could be built into the MediaWiki software. The search function is very poor compared to what it could be. Antrocent (♫♬) 01:45, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you a ton to the Signpost community for this effort. You are by far my favorite community project :-} Hashar (talk) 08:13, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]