Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-07-31/News and notes

Wikimania 2018
This year's annual conference was held this week in Cape Town, South Africa. It came and went and, as always for the attendees, it wasn't long enough. Claimed by the organisers to have been a success, The Signpost hopes to make a report on the event in next month's issue.

Still something wrong with The Signpost's own advertising?
Is one The Signpost not enough? A relatively new user asks at Wikipedia's Teahouse this week how they can start their own Wikipedia newspaper. It not only begs the question 'Are we doing enough to get The Signpost noticed?' but also raises the issue of why, after all these years, Wikipedia still does not have a 'Thank you for registering' page which not only offers some new basic information, but also places a automated message on the user's talk page with some brief tips and where to get help.

New Page Review
Once down to around 350, the number of articles in the New Pages Feed (NPP) rises sharply again following the recent backlog elimination drive. A discussion is taking place at NPR Coordinators on whether an election should be held to install official process coordinators. Following the February 2017 election, the successful candidates did not take up their posts. For anyone who might not be aware, NPR is a major core function and Wikipedia's only firewall against unwanted new articles—the project needs many more skilled and truly active reviewers.

Brief notes

 * New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee has announced the approval of new Wikimedia movement affiliates: the User Group Uganda and the Slovakia User Group are recognised for a one-year renewable period.
 * New administrators: The Signpost welcomes one new administrator to our English encyclopedia this month. Sro23, whose RfA voting closed with 277/4/0, is a Sockpuppets Investigations clerk and has been editing Wikipedia since May 2015.
 * Returned admin tools: After having voluntarily relinquished their admin rights in January, a request for the return of the tools by Ymblanter was granted following a very lengthy discussion on the Bureaucrats' Noticeboard involving many comments from the community.
 * New newsletter: The Timeless skin (reviewed in a previous issue of The Signpost) has a new newsletter. You can read and subscribe to it here.
 * Spell check: Typo Team/moss has collected statistics on misspellings, a list of articles containing a word not found in the dictionary, and instructions for volunteers to fix them.