Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost

New editor-in-chief

It has just come to my attention that there is a new editor in chief of The Signpost, User:Evad37. I would like to say good luck to him, and I hope that his taking the reigns will help the signpost get back on track, and would like to bid farewell to the former Editor-in-chief, Pete Forsyth. You will be missed. Good luck Evad! Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 15:59, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

REINS! (The rein is used to guide and control! ARRGH! Pet Peeve). But yes, hooray! Montanabw^(talk) 05:09, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

+1 Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:05, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Ditto. Evad37, thanks for taking it on. SarahSV ^(talk) 16:30, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Wishing everyone here the best. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 16:36, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the well wishes everyone, though it's really just noting/formalising the defacto job I've been doing for the last few issues - Evad37 [talk] 00:25, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm glad you've formalised this, Evad. Tony (talk) 04:46, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Congratulations and best wishes, Evad37. Thank you for serving, Peteforsyth; enjoyed working with you. --Rosiestep (talk) 04:52, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

+1 to everyone, thanks to Evad37 for stepping up and getting out some great issues already, and thanks to Pete for all the time and energy he devoted to the Signpost earlier!

I have updated the About page, and in the process also removed some recently added social media and contact links that seem obsolete currently.

However, we should make sure that the credentials for the longstanding @wikisignpost Twitter account are transitioned to the new editor-in-chief, as it has been the case since 2009. (I myself ran it when I was editor-in-chief in 2010/11, and handed over the password afterwards.) Who has these currently? And who is administrator of the Signpost's Facebook page?

Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:42, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: I understand Evad37 has access to the Twitter handle now. Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:48, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

The "In the Media" section of issue 10 had a reference to the former editor in the "send us feedback" link. Might want to fix that. ☆ Bri (talk) 04:51, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

 Done, for this week and the preload template[1] - Evad37 [talk] 13:32, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Social Media

Hello! I noticed that the twitter account of The Signpost has not posted since August 2016. Who is in charge of that? The Facebook account is similar, having not posted since Feb. 2017. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:18, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

clearly my reading skills are severely impaired, sorry. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 02:25, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Isn't that answered at #New editor-in-chief? ☆ Bri (talk) 21:37, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

Bri Yes, but there is no reason why these accounts have not posted anything. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 02:31, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

I have been posting on twitter, last post was about 2 hours ago: https://twitter.com/wikisignpost/status/942918928128286720 . I haven't yet gone into facebook (but apparently that wasn't really ever that active, from what I've heard). - Evad37 [talk] 02:35, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

If either of you want to be involved in posting on social media, send me an email - Evad37 [talk] 02:38, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Is there a reason for not simply posting on the Wikipedia Weekly page of Facebook? Tony (talk) 05:16, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Op-ed?

If I wrote up my thoughts on the technology wishlist and what it means to Wikipedia would you consider publishing them? Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 11:33, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I'd like to review what you've got. Could you post a link? ☆ Bri (talk) 19:13, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Cool. I'll write it up and point you to it when I'm done, Bri. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:21, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Actually, would you consider this instead, Bri? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:30, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

You have tons of leeway in choice of subject, but I think it could use some work on formulation of a central idea that is then defended.

I'm trying to find any guides for op-eds, but for now, are you familiar with one of the essay writing forms or inverted pyramid journalism style? That might be a starting point. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:46, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughtful response, Bri. There is a lot that can be said about Wikipedia, knowledge and reliability and I thought I might start a conversation by launching a couple of javelins at the WMF ED and board. But you're right. If I'm using this platform I should at least make a cogent argument and offer serious background. I'll read your links and do some more reading about epistemology and, if you don't mind, ping you a little further down the road. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:06, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Non-breaking spaces

Is there a trick to seeing non-breaking spaces? Here for example, I replaced some non-breaking spaces with regular ones so the text justifies properly. I can view the code and see the   or  , but I can't edit it there. The only way I can figure out to remove the non-breaking spaces is to look at the text with various window widths and see where it is breaking funny. Also, any idea how these are getting added in?  SchreiberBike | ⌨  05:21, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

I think I've seen similar problems when cut-paste transferring from page histories. In the cleanup you and I did on FC, it seems to always be around wikilinked terms, so maybe that is a clue. ☆ Bri (talk) 06:25, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

I wonder if it was caused by this bug:

• T183647: Chrome and Safari browsers wrongly insert NBSPs when content copied from View is pasted into VisualEditor (Closed, Resolved)

The fix for it was deployed yesterday. Since the 2017 wikitext editor ("New wikitext mode" in Beta features) is a mode within VisualEditor, it seems likely to be affected by the bug, even if it wasn't mentioned in the Phabricator task (until I asked about it). I see the edits by Eddie891 were done with the 2017 wikitext editor (Tag: 2017 source edit). Do you use Chrome or Safari, Eddie891? --Pipetricker (talk) 12:36, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

I alternate between both chrome and safari. Is that a problem? Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 18:21, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, what I meant to ask was if you use any of Chrome and Safari (which one doesn't matter), and thus could be affected by the above bug (assuming my guess that it affected the 2017 wikitext editor is correct).

Note: I neither know the details of the above mentioned bug nor have I studied the Featured content page's revision history closely. So the cause of the non-breaking spaces may be something else.

But if that bug is what caused this, it has now been fixed, so all that remains is cleaning up after it. We'll see. --Pipetricker (talk) 00:55, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it. We'll see if it comes up again on the next issue. I was hoping for a trick that would make a non-breaking space look different in the edit window (maybe a special font). I've searched around the web and had no luck finding that.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  01:50, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@SchreiberBike: Paste into a Word document and search for ^s [2] ☆ Bri (talk) 04:28, 13 January 2018 (UTC)