Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers/Goals

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.
 * Increase the number of B class articles beyond the current 18 13:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Increase the number of Good Articles beyond the current 17 13:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Increase the number of Featured Articles beyond the current 2 13:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Increase the number of Featured Lists beyond 0 13:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Short-term goals:
 * Assure that every Country has a list of newspapers 24 missing out of 152 countries, February 2020
 * North America, 22 of 23 countries completed, (missing only Saint Kitts and Nevis, as well as 14 of 21 dependencies), 13:24, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * South America, all 12 countries ✅, missing 2 of 3 dependencies 13:24, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Africa, 17 of 54 countries missing, February 2020
 * Asia, all 49 countries ✅, six lesser states and dependencies missing 13:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Oceania, 3 of 14 countries missing, February 2020
 * Assure that every U.S. state, D.C., and insular area has a list ✅, February 2020
 * Identify Top Level, High Level, Mid Level, and Low Level articles for articles in the WikiProject Newspapers ✅, February 2020
 * Assess all articles that have been created. Reduce the Unassessed and Unknown Assessment articles to zero.  ✅, February 2020

Measuring progress
Metrics for projects include:
 * Increases in numbers of articles on a given topic or location, e.g. Lists of newspapers in a given country or continent, over a certain time period
 * Increases in the number of articles by Class, i.e. Featured Article, Featured List, Good Article, etc., over a certain time period
 * Decreases in the number of Unassessed articles over a certain time period
 * Decreasing the number of newspaper articles without inboboxes.
 * Decreasing the number of newspaper articles without images

Current assessment
Most popular WikiProject Newspapers articles: WikiProject Newspapers/Popular pages

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

Other desirable outcomes
Apart from the principle long- and short-term goals described above, here are some valuable things we could do:
 * ../Notability/: A more detailed notability guideline specific to newspapers. (in progress)
 * ../States/: A collection of source materials, with some of them broken out by state, that can assist in composing articles about newspapers. U.S. ✅, other countries status unknown
 * ../WikiProject resources/: Many WikiProjects could benefit if we are successful at putting together a workable model for collaborative peer production. Specifically, state-based WikiProjects could pitch in by adopting "collaboration of the month" programs, or similar, based on our lists. We should document suggestions.
 * Surfacing relevant research: Summarize and link to research about media literacy and Wikipedia content about newspapers in a project page. (Wikipedia newspaper articles are now automated via tags on talk pages that create categories that can be reviewed.)