Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/From the editor

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• That author page feature is pretty cool! And you even did it retroactively for lapsed contributors like me. Not sure if that's for the best given the embarrassing columns I know I wrote back then... —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 05:06, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
• Have you changed how the headlines are displayed on Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost? I use the "Use a black background with green text" gadget, and can no longer see the headlines on that page unless I right-click-and-highlight. Usually this is cased by someone setting a font to black. DuncanHill (talk) 08:31, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

  @DuncanHill: Define "recently"? The headlines on that page are indeed styled color: black, via a CSS signpost-snippet-title class defined in the page's TemplateStyles. But they've been that way for a good long while now.

  The only thing that's changed "recently" (and by that I mean, over 6 months but less than a year ago) was when TheDJ moved that styling into Template:Signpost/snippet/styles.css. Prior to that edit, it was done via a <span style="color:black">...</span> wrapped directly around the headline. It's possible the gadget handled the attribute-based styling differently than the current <span class="signpost-snippet-title">...</span> TemplateStyles class, though it applies the same color: black to the text. But we'd have to be talking about something that changed eight months ago, for that to be the culprit. Is that "recently"?

  If not, then it's worth considering that the entire site very recently changed its whole appearance; if the issue you're seeing started only days or weeks ago, rather than months, then perhaps the new skin is at least partly to blame? (Or, it's also possible changes were made to the gadget itself recently, in response to the new skin, that may have affected how it handles the Signpost contents styling.) FeRDNYC (talk) 13:33, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

  The format of the all headings from core has recently changed, perphaps the "Use a black background with green text" gadget has not been updated to account for those changes or needs additionally rules now, to account for the signpost ?? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:36, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

  @TheDJ and DuncanHill: That's what I'm thinking. Still... the main site headings get their color: #000 from a h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {...} rule in the global skin CSS, same as they always have. It seems like it would be possible to use standard heading tags for the contents-page headlines, with the existing <span class="signpost-snippet-title"> inside that. (Just like the site headings, which are an <hN> with a <span class="mw-heading"> inside it.)

  The TemplateStyles can still style the inner span as needed, but there's no need to apply any color styling because it'll already be inherited from the parent <hN>. That should allow the green-on-black gadget, or any other restyling tool, to handle those chunks of text the same way they do every other heading on the site. Would probably make everything more accessible for screen readers and the like, too, if each headline is an actual heading.

  We'd have to __NOTOC__ the page, of course. (Be kind of cool if we could not, since the new skin has the TOC in the sidebar where it won't mess up the page layout, but for other skins it'd look bad.) FeRDNYC (talk) 14:12, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

  Apologies — I have no idea where I got the idea that you said "recently" in your initial comment, but it appears that was entirely my imagination. FeRDNYC (talk) 13:38, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

  @FeRDNYC: I use Monobook, and always have, so presumably not the new skin. DuncanHill (talk) 13:50, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

• This is some high quality technical work! The author pages are particularly nice to have. Thank you to the team! —Ganesha811 (talk) 11:54, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
• I may be responsible for some of technical mess, I revamped the look and feel of the Signpost back in 2015. This is also where the tagging initiative started off—we were looking at all of the times we'd used the "Related articles" template and thought to ourselves, gee it sure would be nice if we generate these automatically. Ya'll should try out Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Templates/Voter by the way. I built it in that era, and it's legitimately very useful reader engagement tool IMO, but I see that it hasn't been used since 2018. ResMar 20:17, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Messy or not, you gave me a sturdy set of shoulders to stand on when building these features, which is all I could ever ask for -- hats off to you for all of that! ;^) jp×g 02:00, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

• Now, now, it wasn't impossible to find published articles in the past, you just had to use these neat things called "categories". And only be looking for articles from between 2005 and 2015. And it would also help if you knew what year the article was published and the column title. Okay, the new system is better, I said it. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:06, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
• Very cool; great work everyone! — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk; please {{ping}} me in replies) 22:38, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
• Yes, it would be a neat graph: Uwappa (talk) 17:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)