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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/From the archives

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From the archives

Five, ten, and fifteen years ago

The Signpost was founded in 2005, as the Wikipedia Signpost. Whether published weekly, monthly or bimonthly, it is worth looking back over the past five, ten, or fifteen years of Signpost publishing. The Signpost is, without doubt, the most independent and reliable publication available to date.[citation needed]

Five years ago: January 2018

There's an interesting report about a seemingly active attempt to edit Brigid Hughes out of the history of The Paris Review. However, our big story that month was an interview with Ser Amantio di Nicolao, who was (and remains) the top contributor to Wikipedia by edit count. At the time, he had over two million edits; he now has over five million, nearly double the edit count of BrownHairedGirl in second place. Here's a couple samples:


The whole article is well worth reading, but the nice thing about a wiki is that you can dangle a taster and then hyperlink the rest.

Ten years ago: January 2013

Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wikipedia meetup in 2009. He edited as User:AaronSw. He died ten years ago this month.

We started the year with a Op-Ed, "Meta, where innovative ideas die", detailing the problems and benefits of that vitally important but very poorly attended sister site. We also predicted 2013 would be the year of "Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor", which was largely true, although given the disastrous launch of the Visual Editor later that year, one of those wouldn't be for the right reasons. I don't think we talk about Lua enough, though: Lua is a programming language that got added in to Wikipedia via MediaWiki and managed to replace a lot of complicated workarounds used by templates with more elegant code. I'm not even sure its full potential has appeared yet; for example: Could we use Lua to make filling out forms for our featured content candidates easier by, for example, letting people choose which category they want to file the featured content into from a list before starting the nomination? Wikivoyage launched 15 January, and we attempted reform of Requests for Adminship. However, the saddest story was the death of Aaron Swartz, who died by suicide after downloading content from JSTOR, not disseminating it, reaching an agreement to delete the files, and then being prosecuted for it anyway:

Tributes and a rather deeply felt comment section can be found here.

Fifteen years ago: January 2008

The first WikiWorld rerun

Kind of a quiet month. From a Signpost perspective, perhaps the most notable thing was WikiWorld, that long running comic series, starting to reach its end. On 28 January 2008 we announced, "WikiWorld has ceased its weekly schedule, but will continue to run occasional new comics, as well as 'classic' previously-published comics." In fact, new comics would come to an end by the end of the year. I'm sure CommonsComix will one day follow suit. Or be opened up to more creators.

In Wikipedia news, the big announcements were the "controversial" creation of rollback rights, which lets one instantly revert an edit with a click of a link, if you're trustworthy enough to be given the right. Rollback is now pretty uncontroversial, and a boon to vandal fighters.

Secondly, two articles detailed the new parser preprocessor, which, not remembering the 2007-era parser is kind of hard to fully grasp. It did give the new #iferror parserfunction, though, so that's something.

Finally, we interviewed User:John Broughton, who had just written Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. This would later be released under a free license and incorporated into the help pages of Wikipedia.