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Well, here we are! While the featured content promoted in December won't appear until our January issue, this marks the end of the featured content we'll be reporting on this year. We used to try to work a bit less behind, but, well, I've not been a consistent Signpost contributor, but I have done it over many, many years....
Tell you what, here's a peek behind the writing process, and why things are the way they are:
When The Signpost was published weekly or thereabouts, the amount of featured content in that week was small, and you could just copy-paste the lead in the worst case scenario. If you missed a week, having two or even three weeks in one article isn't that bad. You also have seven days to write about seven days of content; this isn't that bad.
But with monthly publication, if you miss a month, you just miss a month. Two months of content is simply too much to fit in one article. So it really needs to get out on time.
However, we publish around the 25th of each month. So, for example, let's say this month we covered things promoted from, say, November 15 to December 15. That gives ten days from the time the list of content meant to appear in the article is complete to publication time. Now, you can start preparing a bit in advance, but the period just before publication of an issue is full of a lot of other things that happen, like everyone trying to copyedit everyone else's articles and trying to get everything ready for publication. So that first ten days is probably lost, at the minimum. It's a lot harder, and it gets harder from there.
First off, unlike weekly publication, it's important to keep the writeups of the content short, so the article as a whole isn't too long. There used to be a huge push on Wikipedia to always make sure the first paragraph of the lead summarised the article as whole, after which the rest of the lead was meant to go back and fill in detail. Some featured articles are still written this way. Very few featured lists are. So you can't just copy the leads, you have to spend some time editing them down. So you need the time.
Of course, the way I set these up, at least, involves a search and replace on entries from WP:GO. So, for this month, I went to Wikipedia:Goings-on/October 30, 2022, Wikipedia:Goings-on/November 6, 2022, Wikipedia:Goings-on/November 13, 2022, and so on, and compile everything into one big file, keeping articles and lists seperate.
Here's the last few entries for this month in featured articles, as taken from there, using the editor so we get them in wikitext:
* [[Theodora Kroeber]] (28 Nov)
* ''[[Zork]]'' (28 Nov)
* ''[[Dime Mystery Magazine]]'' (28 Nov)
* [[Prince Alfred of Great Britain]] (29 Nov)
The list would be a lot longer, of course. I delete the dates at the end, then do a series of searches and replaces:
| Search for | Replace with | Why? |
|---|---|---|
"* "
|
";"
|
Starting a line with a semicolon is how you make a description list. |
"]]"
|
"]], nominated by [[User:|]]:"
|
Sets up the rest of the basic formatting |
This gets us:
;[[Theodora Kroeber]], nominated by [[User:|]]:
;''[[Zork]], nominated by [[User:|]]:''
;''[[Dime Mystery Magazine]], nominated by [[User:|]]:''
;[[Prince Alfred of Great Britain]], nominated by [[User:|]]:
...And, with a bit of fixing of the italics that moved to the wrong place, we're done with the first step. There's ways around having to fix the italics, but are only really worth doing as code, not something you type anew each time.
I then go to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Featured log before pasting these in, and fill out the user(s) responsible for each nomination before that [[User:|]] gets evaluated. Paste that into the featured article section, and the lists (which I process at the same time, since it's the same formatting) into the lists section, and I can move to images.
Now, if I had this set up as a simple press a button and the search and replace gets done thing, it wouldn't be big deal to do multiple batches. But I haven't done this. So instead, I.... type out all those search and replaces, and the variant ones used for featured pictures anew every month. Or, if I want to do multiple batches, then... every time I do a batch. Not ideal. Also, there's some polishing up to do after writing all the descriptions: Space the featured articles with illustrations so the images don't crowd, adjust the featured pictures to alternate tall and wide images so they look better on various screensizes (and ideally get a pleasant colour balance as you scroll down), and so on.
So it's better to do everything at once. And that means I want as much time to do it in. And that means I need to start work as soon after the last publication of the Signpost as possible, so that I don't get busy and miss completing it.
Anyway, with that overly-detailed explanation of simple regular expressions that I should probably just break down and write a bot to do, this is your Signpost correspondent, signing off!
Nineteen featured articles were promoted in November.
Twenty-six featured pictures were promoted in November, including the ones at the top and bottom of this article.
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Nine featured lists were promoted in November.
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