Module:Signpost/doc

This module makes indexes of articles for the Signpost. It has two main functions:

• Making formatted lists of articles. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article list maker for documentation.
• Counting the number articles that fit certain criteria. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article count for documentation.

Article data

The article data is stored in index modules organised by year, like Module:Signpost/index/2005, Module:Signpost/index/2006, etc. You can see the full list of index modules here. The data for all Signpost articles for a given year goes in that year's index module.

It is possible to edit the index modules by hand, but the recommended way is to use the SignpostTagger gadget. With SignpostTagger you can edit article data directly from Signpost article pages, and using it eliminates the possibility of making formatting errors or putting the data in the wrong place.

Data points

The index modules each contain a list of articles for that year. Each article has the following data points:

• The date the article was published, in YYYY-MM-DD format
• The subpage of the article. For example, for the special report "Adminship from the German perspective" located at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-22/Special report, the subpage is "Special report".
• The article's title.
• The authors of the article (optional).
• A list of tags for the article. For example, the special report mentioned above has the tags "germanwikipedia", "reformingrfa", "requestsforadminship", and "specialreport" (optional).

Tags and aliases

Tags are used to classify articles. For example, you can find all of the humourous articles by using the article list maker template to list all articles with the tag "humour". It is also possible to specify aliases for tags. For example, "humor" is an alias for the "humour" tag, so when you are tagging an article with SignpostTagger you can use either one of them. Tag aliases are stored at Module:Signpost/aliases.