Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Resources

WP:POST/R

Resources

This page lists external and internal resources for Signpost writers researching news items to cover in an upcoming issue. For information on the use of templates within Signpost articles see the style guidelines and the documentation for the specific templates in question. For content guidance see the content guidelines.

News and notes

Community mailing lists:

Wikimedia-l i: Very high-volume, of primary interest.
WikimediaAnnounce-l i: low traffic, postings are intended to automatically forward to Wikimedia-l as well
GLAM (i),
GLAM-US (i),
Commons-l (i),
Wikidata (i),
Wikisource-l (i),
Wikimania-l (i)

Planet 2.0: A Foundation-run community blog aggregator, includes official blog content.

Diff An official blog run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Publishes both press releases and some community content (cf. Planet 2.0).

Related changes aggregators

meta-wiki

(cf.) Related changes details for chapter and Foundation reports.

foundation-wiki related changes

(cf.) foundation-wiki recent changes

(cf.) Related changes details for Wikipedians in Residence.

In the media

Wikipedia Review RSS feed (very useful listing of news stories actually focused on Wikipedia)
Google News results for Wikipedia (specify an appropriate custom date range in the Search tools dropdown)
Wikipedia:Press coverage
Wikipedia Weekly news discussions
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions
Twitter mentions of "Wikipedia": https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Wikipedia%22%20min_faves%3A10%20min_retweets%3A10&src=typed_query

WikiProject report

List of previously published interviews (reverse chronological order)
Directory of WikiProjects (by topic)
Category for WikiProjects (by topic; subdivisions for collaborations, inactive projects, etc)
Prefix Index for WikiProjects (alphabetical; every page starting with "WikiProject")
Most active projects by watchers of project's page
Most active projects by edits to project's talk page
Call for interviews template
Sample message for inviting interview responses

Example questions

*What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject XXXXXX? What kind of XXXXXX-related articles do you like to work on?

Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
Has your project formed any "Special Interest Groups" (workgroups)?
What are WikiProject XXXXXX's most pressing needs?
How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?

Discussion report

Featured content

WP:GO is by far the most useful resource, setting out all promotions in convenient weekly logs.

Other resources include:

Technology report

Server admin log
Recently fixed bugs
Wikimedia Technical blog
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)
de:WP:NEU (technical "Project news" page on the German Wikipedia, useful for finding (links to) newsworthy bugs)
https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ (recent outages and performance issues)
Wikimedia Foundation Grafana (status dashboards)
Software deployments

Recent research

A todo list of academic publications for this section (which doubles as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter) is maintained in form of an Etherpad that is updated monthly, mostly based on the @WikiResearch Twitter feed
Wikimedia Research Showcase (monthly presentations)
WMF's own research projects

Humour

Unusual articles
Category:Humorous Wikipedia essays
Category:Wikipedia cabal humor
Wikipedia:Silly Things
Wikipedia:Yet more Best of BJAODN

Publication

Template:Signpost/Deadline contains the anticipated writing and publishing deadlines for the upcoming issue. It is transcluded in various other pages, such as the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom.

Script

As of May 2017, there is a new userscript to automate the publishing process – see User:Evad37/SPS.

Manual off-wiki tasks

The script does all the on-wiki publishing tasks, including local and global mass-messaging. Tasks that still need to be completed manually by the Outreach Managers are:

Announce the new issue on WikimediaAnnounce-L, using the pre-generated output below for copy & paste. Send from the wikipediasignpostgmail.com account. When composing the message in Gmail, click the T_x icon to remove HTML formatting before sending. (WikimediaAnnounce-l will automatically forward every message to Wikimedia-L, so do not send directly to Wikimedia-L, unless there is a forwarding error.) Check here and here to ensure that the messages have been posted.
Post to social media: Tweet about the new issue, linking, for example, to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2024-05-29 as landing page. A bridge has been set up to automatically forward tweets to the WikiSignpost Facebook page.
Cleanup the newsroom: Reset the article status table on the Newsroom by following the instructions in the hidden comments in that section. Archive discussions on its talk page related to the now-published issue.

If there is a problem with the automated process, follow the steps in the section below to publish manually.

Mailing list output for this issue (pre-generated output for copy & paste)
The Signpost – Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue – Error: Invalid time. {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue\|7}} Single-page view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single https://facebook.com/wikisignpost https://twitter.com/wikisignpost

Manual process

Main details

Handle the actual "publishing" tasks in the following order; it should avoid the necessity of having to purge each individual article to update the footer.

Create an issue contents page (at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/YYYY-MM-DD, e.g. this Wednesday: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-01). It should be in the same format as Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-12-22 (The numbers in the second parameter, the "story numbers," determine the order of the stories in talkpage notifications). If there is a note from the editor, make that story #0, so it is at the top of the list. (It will have different formatting, so only use "0" for important announcements). The sample page shows the "standard order," but it's fine to adjust it to reflect importance. Add the new issue date to each line. Copy the section titles from the draft header template on each section. When you first save the page, all the links will be red until you complete later steps.
Move each section to a subpage of Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/YYYY-MM-DD. When you move each one, in the page title, replace "/Next issue/" with "/YYYY-MM-DD/" (with the actual date numbers).
- Make sure each section has a standard name (e.g., "News and notes", not "News") so that the links to previous issues work.
- Untick the "Move associated talk page" option (the talk pages should only contain the "please use the newsroom" notice).
- If you're an admin or page mover, untick "Leave a redirect behind". If you're not, ask an admin to delete the pages you leave behind (at some point in the next few hours; not mission-critical for publication).
- Optional for now: Purge the "issue contents" page created in step #1, and the links should all turn blue.
Double-check that the footer exists at the bottom of each section. If it's not there, add the following line: <noinclude>{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-comments-end||YYYY-MM-DD|}}</noinclude> The YYYY-MM-DD in this code should be replaced with the previous issue in which that section ran.
Change Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue to the date of publication, and update Volume # and Issue #. Write an edit summary that notifies readers, via watchlists, that you are publishing a new issue; e.g. "Publishing new edition."
Edit main page, starting with the generic skeleton. Ensure there are no redlinks by removing pages that are not part of the current issue, and manually add irregular content sections. Copying titles and blurbs is tedious without scripts.
Create a new single-page edition by copying this code: {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single|issuedate=2016-XX-XX}} to the subsequent redlink you'll see: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-06-01.
Create archive page by adding {{Signpost archive|last edition date|today's date|next edition date}} in the format {{Signpost archive|2016-XX-XX|2016-XX-XX|2016-XX-XX}}.
Remove "draft" templates from the headers of the pages (this goes from {{"Signpost draft" down to "ready = Yes}}).
Purge the cache of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue [1], Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost [2], Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single [3], this issue's archive page [4] and this page (the last for pre-generated output to copy/pastes farther down)
Announce the new issue on WikimediaAnnounce-L, using the pre-generated output above for copy & paste. Send from the wikipediasignpostgmail.com account. When composing the message in Gmail, click the T_x icon to remove HTML formatting before sending. (WikimediaAnnounce-l will automatically forward every message to Wikimedia-L, so do not send directly to Wikimedia-L, unless there is a forwarding error.) Check here and here to ensure that the messages have been posted.
Post the Signpost on the talkpages of subscribers. You must be an admin or mass message sender to do this.
→ See the collapsed section below for instructions and the message wikitext ("Manual process: English Wikipedia mass message delivery output for this issue")

Additionally:

Tweet about the new issue, linking, for example, to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2024-05-29 as landing page. Post to our Facebook page as well. (Note, this will automatically forward to Twitter; we should perhaps disconnect them, if we are going to be diligently posting to both sites.)
Post the Signpost on talk pages of subscribers on other projects, using m:Global message delivery. The subscribe message is loaded into m:Special:MassMessage for automatic delivery; you can use the pre-generated output below for copy & paste. Only users on the access list can initiate a bot run (Meta admins can add themselves).
Update the archive overview for the current year at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Archives/2024, by copying the date above (which will be older) and updating the issue number and date.
Cleanup the newsroom: Reset the article status table on the Newsroom by following the instructions in the hidden comments.
Leave a note under Notes to thank this week's contributors and to announce any important upcoming news and any issues that have arisen with publication.
Find the previous instance of each section, and add a link to the current edition's section. Here is an example edit, where the previous Traffic Report is updated to add a "next Traffic Report" link. Keep in mind, not all sections run in every edition; so in some cases, this will mean going back two, three, or more editions.

Manual process: English Wikipedia mass message delivery output for this issue

Send from Special:MassMessage using the following details.

Page or category containing list of pages to leave a message on:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Subscribe

Subject of the message (also used as the edit summary):

Make sure the date is correct before sending!

''The Signpost'': Error: Invalid time.

Page to be sent as a message:

(leave blank)

Section of the page:

(leave blank)

Body of the message:

Make sure the dates and details are all correct before sending!

<div lang="en" dir="ltr"><div style="-moz-column-count:2; -webkit-column-count:2; column-count:2;"> {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue}} </div><!--Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue--> <div class="hlist" style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> * '''[[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost|Read this Signpost in full]]''' * [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Single-page]] * [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Subscribe|Unsubscribe]] * [[User:MediaWiki message delivery|MediaWiki message delivery]] ([[User talk:MediaWiki message delivery|talk]]) ~~~~~ </div></div>

(The formatted output should look something like this)

Manual process: Global mass message delivery output for this issue

Send from meta:Special:MassMessage using these details:

Page or category containing list of pages to leave a message on:

Global message delivery/Targets/Signpost

Subject of the message (also used as the edit summary):

Make sure the date is correct before sending!

''The Signpost'': Error: Invalid time.

Page to be sent as a message:

(leave blank)

Section of the page:

(leave blank)

Body of the message:

Make sure the dates are all correct before sending!

<div lang="en" dir="ltr" style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">[[File:WikipediaSignpostIcon.svg|40px|right]] ''News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's newspaper''</div>
<div style="-moz-column-count:2; -webkit-column-count:2; column-count:2;">
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|8}}</div>
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">'''[[w:en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost|Read this Signpost in full]]''' · [[w:en:Wikipedia:Signpost/Single|Single-page]] · [[m:Global message delivery/Targets/Signpost|Unsubscribe]] · [[m:Global message delivery|Global message delivery]] ~~~~~
</div></div>

Generic skeleton for manually updating the [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|issue contents page]] of the upcoming issue

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|1|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|News and notes|Add to "News and notes"}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|2|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|In the news|Add to "In the news"}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|3|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Discussion report|Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|4|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|WikiProject report|Talking with WikiProject}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|5|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Featured content|The best of the week}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|6|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Arbitration report|The Report on Lengthy Litigation}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|7|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Recent research|Recent research}}

{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Cover-item|{{{1}}}|8|Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue|Technology report|Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News}}

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