Wikinews:2026 Wind-down Wikinews
With the pending closure of the project, there are several tasks that could be done to ensure the read-only version of Wikinews is presented appropriately. We can use this page to track that work.
Tasks for anyone
If you are a non-reviewer and non-admin and still want to help, consider the following tasks:
| Tasks | Status |
|---|---|
| Review and weigh in on flagged discussions |  Done
|
| Contribute to Wikimedia Foundation closes Wikinews after 21 years | Done
|
| Comment on requests at Deletion requests | |
| Suggest additional tasks at talk page |
Reviewer tasks
I'm not sure how disabling FlaggedRevs will affect unsighted changes so reviewers should work through the list to ensure the stable version is what we want to remain permanent:
DPL
Update May 4, 2026: I believe we got most of, if not all the critical uses of DPL changed to static lists. What's left might be removed before DPL get's disabled. See this discussion for more.
DPL will likely be disabled, causing an error to be reported on any page that uses DPL to return a list of pages.
We use DPL on many pages that will need to be updated to avoid having an error reported.
The following is a list of pages we should probably remove DPL from and replace with static lists:
| Page | Comment |
|---|---|
| Main page | Done
|
| Newsroom | Done
|
| Wikinews:Water cooler | Done
|
| Other pages in Mainspace | (Remove DPL April 30) |
| Other pages in Template namespace | (Remove DPL April 30) |
| Wikinews:Archives | To be done by Dexbot |
| Australia/2004 | Done
|
| Australia/2005 | Done
|
| Australia/2006 | Done
|
| Australia/2007 | Done
|
| Australia/2008 | Done
|
| Australia/2009 | Done
|
| Categories | I believe the categories are largely done but not fully updated in Category:Pages using the DynamicPageList extension. See also comment on phab T423512) |
| Portals | Parent pages are typically redirects to Categories of the same name. However, the redirect pages have subpages (which don't appear to be linked anywhere), that are organized by date, similar to the WN:Archives. See also below |
| Infoboxes | (see below) |
Pages using DPL: 1,428
A note on that number: Working through the list I've come across some difficulties. Category:Pages using the DynamicPageList extension seems to persistently list some pages as using DPL, despite DPL being removed. I noticed it initially with templates, which also previously used FlaggedRevs, though that has been recently disabled for templates. See phab T423512 and disabling FlaggedRevs in the template namespace. The broke-around I'm implementing in some cases is to move the current template and recreate it with a copy/paste and that seems to flush the template out of the category.
However, I just found numerous categories that still report having DPL. I likely don't have the time to get through that entire list and I'm not sure it's worth it to re-open the ticket and get help, given that 1. DPL is no longer supported and 2. pending closure of the project. If someone else wants to jump into that problem, please do. Otherwise, we may just let it ride and see how the categories react to DPL being disabled. Not an ideal solution...
Archives
Our WN:Archives is largely organized using DPL, using {{DateDPL}} extensively. I'm not really sure how to tackle this. See Wikinews talk:2026 Wind-down Wikinews#Our Archives and/or Wikinews:Water cooler/technical#DPL, our archives, and potential bot use and weigh in if you can.
Update April 25, 2026: The plan is to utilize a bot. See Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals#Proposal to unblock bot for final DPL cleanup, phabricator:T421796, and Special:Contributions/Dexbot.
Infoboxes
- See also: Wikinews:Admin action alerts#In anticipation of DPL being disabled
- See also: Wikinews talk:2026 Wind-down Wikinews#Bot to convert DPL to static lists
All of the infoboxes we place on articles use DPL.
See the following for examples of how DPL is being converted to static lists:
- Template:Afghanistan (manually rebuild using {{Infosection}} to replace {{infobox}})
- Template:Albania
- Template:Mauritania (already used {{Infosection}} instead of {{infobox}}, simply replace DPL with copied/pasted static list)
Feel free to add to this page.
@Michael.C.Wright: See phab:T421796#11825297.
| Infoboxes | Status |
|---|---|
| Event infoboxes | Done
|
| State infoboxes | Done
|
| Country infoboxes | Done
|
| Election infobox templates | DPL not used |
| Hurricane season infoboxes | Done
|
| Un-sub-categorized infoboxes | Done?
|
| Uncategorized MetaInfoboxes | Done
|
Portals
Pages in the portal namespace, (portals are usually redirects to category pages from the looks of it) apparently have date-formatted subpages that contain DPL as well. DPL searches for pages containing DPL did not reflect this. Dexbot has however, and appears to be going through them.
There are still a few thousand pages being reported to contain DPL and that number is not decreasing in-line with the amount of pages Dexbot is editing.
Example:
- Portal:New Zealand (Redirect)
- Special:PrefixIndex/Portal:New Zealand/ (List of sub-pages for Portal:New Zealand)
I am still trying to figure out how many portals are configured in a similar way.
I have found that often these portal pages will contain a subpage titled "Wikipedia" that will contain a DPL. For example:
- Portal:Florida/Wikipedia (old version) used a DPL to list the articles
Archive published articles
We should archive all published articles and make sure the quality is at the level we want it to be. See Wikinews:Archive conventions for instructions on the archival process.
This will require someone who is both a reviewer and admin to complete, as admin can't sight changes and published articles are protected to admin-only.
There are categories of "archived-but-not-really-archived" articles that could be addressed: