What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a new paradigm in human discourse. It's a place where anyone with a browser can go, pick a subject that interests them, and without even logging in, start an argument. In fact, Wikipedia is the largest and most comprehensive collection of arguments in human history, incorporating spats and vendettas on subjects ranging from Suleiman the Magnificent to Dan the Automator. (links added)

— Lore Sjöberg, "The Wikipedia FAQK", Wired, 2006

The Signpost presents the Wikipedia Discussion Report, which is an automatically updating table of Wikipedia's most active conversations. This table will be of interest to anyone who wants to identify the latest and most engaging conversations in Wikipedia. Often, the conversations with the most participants are those which examine Wikipedia's most interesting edges in editorial policy, coverage of content, and values of users. Discussions with high engagement are almost always conflicts and debates, where discussion participants are passionate about a topic and recruit others into the conversation.

This technology replaces previous options for identifying popular conversations, which include checking noticeboards for alerts that side conversations have grown heated, or asking through social networks for news. Wikipedia is still a surprising mix of human process and technology, because whereas most other platforms flag hot topics and push them out in feeds to all sorts of users, Wikipedia has no algorithmic feeds to offer users opportunities to join high-conflict and controversial spaces.

JPxG, editor in chief and chief technology officer for The Signpost, developed this tool in the hope that it could facilitate the production of more and better "Discussion report" features in the newspaper. The idea is that as often as is useful, the tool would generate a table of the latest discussions, and any volunteer journalist who would write the commentary on the stories would be relieved of the burden of having to hunt them all down across the wiki as has been necessary in the past. Anyone who wishes to write for The Signpost may do so without further commitment by checking in at WP:NEWSROOM.

The table reports the following information:

short

the abbreviation for the forum in which the discussion occurred. Experienced Wikipedians recognize all these.

archive

the archival identifier for the forum

head

the person who instigated the discussion

length

the count in characters of the length of the discussion. The tool is set to identify discussions which are at least 70k, which means about 12k words, or the equivalent of 50 paper pages of text

timestamps

the count of comments in the discussion. Typically a few editors account for the majority of these comments

userlinks

the count of links to userpages in the discussion. Timestamps typically include 2 of these, the user page and user talk page

usertalks

the count of links to user talk pages

distusers

count of distinct users. This is the more precise count of discussion participants.

maxindent

Wikipedia's forum discussion technology is still in the 1990s. When one user comments on another user's post, they indent. When another user comments on the reply, they indent again, and in this way, conversations are threaded. The subdiscussions with the most indenting means that some user has said something especially engaging or inflammatory.

firsttime

when the discussion began

lasttime

the last time anyone posted in the discussion. After two weeks with no posts, discussions are eligible for close, although many factors can make them suitable for close sooner.