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Long-term goals: Create well-sourced, in-depth articles for every notable newspaper, so that WikiPedians and others searching for information on newspapers can evaluate the newspaper's authenticity, geographical context, scope of content, and historical significance. Increase the number of Featured Articles, Good Articles, and Featured lists about newspapers. As of February 16, 2020, the following metrics are used.

Short-term goals:

Measuring progress

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Metrics for projects include:

Current assessment

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As of 10 August 2024, there are 11,692 articles within the scope of WikiProject Newspapers, of which 3 are featured and 34 are good articles. This makes up 0.17% of the articles on Wikipedia, 0.03% of all featured articles and lists, and 0.08% of all good articles. Including non-article pages, such as talk pages, redirects, categories, etc., there are 32,922 pages in the project.

Most popular WikiProject Newspapers articles: Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers/Popular pages

Continents

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Thousand page project

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We have taken the USNPL list of U.S. Newspapers and researchers from Wellesley College have generated via a script extant papers that seem to not have a Wikipedia page or have a Wikipedia page but no infobox. The number of existing pages without an infobox is in the hundreds, the number of papers without an article is in the thousands. This Google spreadsheet contains a list of all USNPL newspapers, the ones that have Wikipedia pages (with corresponding links) and the ones that don't, marking the entries that are missing the infobox or are stub pages.

Our goal is to go through the list and create 1,000 pages and/or infoboxes for papers listed in the USNPL (or other reputable sources) that don't currently have them. The pages should at minimum provide a few sentences of history, information about current ownership and publication frequency, a link to online versions, and -- importantly -- several high quality, independent sources as footnotes.

In some cases newspapers listed in the USNPL have actually folded (i.e. the USNPL is inaccurate). Adding a page to Wikipedia on the defunct newspaper as well as a cease date in the infobox will count towards the thousand page goal as well, as it significantly improves the quality of information on local newspapers in America.

New pages to which an infobox is added as well count as one page, obviously.

Adjudicating which pages count

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Most pages will be easy calls -- if a paper in the USNPL did not have a Wikipedia page or did not have an infobox as of June 15, 2018 but has one on December 15, 2018 that meets notability requirements and supplies basic info it will count towards the challenge.

Some questions are likely to require adjudication, however, and for that we will rely on the folks at Wellesley College to determine which pages count. (As an example -- determining whether correctly retitling an existing infoboxed page to make it more findable counts, etc).

Charity Challenge

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There is a "charity challenge" associated with this project, but it is not maintained on the Wikipedia site. You can find more about it here.

U.S. states project

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Information about the U.S. states newspaper project can be found on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers/States page.

Other desirable outcomes

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Apart from the principle long- and short-term goals described above, here are some valuable things we could do: