Wikipedia talk:Free English newspaper sources

Chicago Tribune Archives
You might want to add Chicago Tribune Archives to the list. The site is free to use, with no subscription or password required. I have used it often in doing research for WP articles. Eddie Blick (talk) 03:14, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Old Fulton NY Post Cards
Old Fulton NY Post Cards is a good resource for some older, mostly New York State newspapers. The challenge is that migrating from one found reference to another doesn't change the URL. It's always fultonhistory.com. A person reading an article who clicks on the reference link is taken to the site's web page. We obviously can't change that. Can someone figure out how to make the cited newspaper page functional in ? Sample at Frederick E. Toy.-- Georgia Army Vet  Contribs  Talk  01:19, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Confusion between free and gratis
This project page refers to these sites as "free", implying free content. This would mean that the text could be copied verbatim from the source without copyright issues. However, it appears that what is actually meant is gratis – i.e. free of monetary charge to access. Please can this page be clarified? For instance, I would recommend moving to "Free of charge English newspaper sources" (and leaving a redirect), for one. Regards, DesertPipeline (talk) 09:06, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

npr.org
npr.org is a free online source, but it is not included in this list. Is npr.org not an "online newspaper" source? Jarble (talk) 18:22, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Combined search engine to search all FENS at once
I've started on a project to search all the FENS at in one query, using a Google Programmable Search Engine (see about PSE and tutorial), and I'm looking for feedback and collaborators. The public url for this is available at https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=628ec88d14cbbef0e and you can try it now. (You could link it from your Talk page, something like this: search 20 FENS or use the box below.) This is only the first version, so far from ready for prime time, but you can play around with it to get an idea of what's possible. Ultimately, my goal would be to have a single clickable link, such that when you click it, it searches all twenty FENS, consolidates the results, and displays them search-result style, with multiple pages of around ten results each. (Something like the Wikipedia Library does, with a single url that can search dozens of databases at once, and return mixed results, e.g.: search 'Suez crisis' at WP Lib.)

The FENS PSE currently knows about all twenty domain urls from WP:FENS rev. 1075395521‎ of 15 March 2022, but the result page only seems to use some of them: four in one query: Papers past, Trove, CDNC, and Welsh Newspapers, and a slightly different four in another: Chronicling America, Newspapers.com, CDNC, and Trove. Not quite sure why, although I suspect it's because certain sites hide the results in a database and require a query param to surface it, where a few others may have static pages with the result under the domain; but that's just a guess. To the extent that I understand PSE, I believe it does a Google site search in each of the twenty urls, and then commbines the results. How it ranks combined results from 20 different searches and sorts them into top ten, next page, and so on, is an interesting question, and also appears to be a weak point. So, when playing around with the url, you need to go forward to 2nd or 3rd page of results and beyond, because the results seem clumped or sorted strangely. The first four or so results are ads or sponsored results; you can skip past those. (P.S. The little search box over there does *not* peform a search, it merely takes you to the FENS PSE; you have to enter your query terms and hit the Search button. The goal is to skip that step, and have a single click go straight to the results, just like at WP Lib.)

As a second issue, I'm not sure that site search is the best way to do it, and PSE supports paths below the domain level, so my next version (possibly a second engine, so we can compare results) will have twenty urls, but not at the domain level, but instead using the search url for each website. I'm not sure what Google PSE will do with that. It may be that we cannot get a PSE to use the query url for individual sites, for example, https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=q&hs=1&r=1&results=1&txf=txIN&txq=Suez+crisis for Boston College. So we'll have to see.

There's a couple of other ways to access the PSE, including custom search JSON API, or the API via REST. Using REST from JavaScript returns a JSON response (e.g.: Suez crisis). That's not a user friendly result, but one of the folks over at WP:SCRIPTREQ might be able to help with that down the road, but we're nowhere near to formulating a question yet; just something to keep in mind.

One issue or problem to discuss and work out is this: how do we best collaborate on this? I don't want this to be "mine", but to belong to the community, and subject to the same discussions, improvements, etc., that an article would. But, there are a couple of problems: 1) this is outside Wikipedia, and more importantly, 2) although anyone can create or maintain a PSE, you have to be logged in to Google in order to do so. The Google PSE interface does allow the creator to add "admins" who can muck around with the PSE (add and subtract urls, and so on), so that's a first step, for anyone who's interested rhe Google help pages are detailed and clear, and no special technical expertise is necessary to create or maintain a PSE, so let me know if you want to be a PSE admin for this particular FENS PSE. Alternatively, you could just create your own. If anyone has experience working on a collaborative project which depended on a third-party product which required a login owned by one person, how did you organize the project? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 05:58, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

U.S. state list
I don’t have time to add them all right now but this is a list of some U.S. state-level digital newspaper projects by universities and historical societies etc. jengod (talk) 17:43, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

https://library.unt.edu/digital-newspaper-unit/other-state-digital-newspaper-programs/

Washington Post (1974)
What's the best way to find an article about the Cyprus conflict which was published on July 23 in Washington post? Alaexis¿question? 18:43, 9 July 2023 (UTC)