The Signpost tagging initiative
The Signpost has been in continuous weekly publication on the English Wikipedia since its foundation in early 2005 by future (now well-former) Board chairman Michael Snow. And over more than a decade of weekly publication we have accumulated an incredibly lengthy and detailed record about the issues, controversies, successes, and failures of the English Wikipedia community and the movement at large.
The movement has advanced almost incomprehensibly far since then; today the Wikimedia Foundation employs 280+ staffers running the fifth most visited website in the world. And no one's kept better track of the progress than the Signpost has. The contents of the Signpost archive contain the most extensive record available anywhere or to anyone of the things that have mattered and continue to matter to the community, and by browsing the Signpost archives editors can familiarize themselves with any and all of the things that matter in the community, from VisualEditor to semi-protection to hoax-making to editcountitis. Even things that most have forgotten about: for instance, how many remember that recently-retired vice president of engineering and long-time Wikipedian Erik Möller was working on a "Wikidata" concept all the way back in 2005 (we do)? How many of us have ever heard of nofollow (we have)?
Yet for all of its richness the Signpost archives are rarely used. Searching the archives for information on what you want is a pain, and since the results will be returned out of order it is the onus of the person doing the search to figure out what happened in what order. While doing research for a story I am, by way of the effort that I must make in reconstructing sequences of events through the Signpost archives, reminded of why hardly anyone ever does it. Articles are written and read, then archived and never heard from again; yet there is a rich wealth of information that the community could potentially make use of, a decade's worth of publications informing who we are and where we came from that is just too hard to pick apart to be of any use to anyone.
We at the Signpost have been hard at work over the past few months building up a systematic way to change that.