You can view a stream of the presentation here on the WMF's Youtube channel, starting at the 14:49 minute mark and concluding at the 1:12:00 minute mark.

On July 24th 2026, at Wikimania 2026, Noé Gasparini, User:Noé, gave a presentation titled: "Kurier, Signpost, wikipress: You can be a Wikimedia journalist" presenting on Wikipress projects and the current state of Wikimedia focused journals & newsletters, from user-run to staff-run and the spaces in-between. The presentation included a Q&A session afterwards. This recap article will attempt to summarize Noé's presentation and the Q&A.

Highlighting user-run outlets, Gasparini explained that the presentation was originally a workshop collaboration with Lane Rasberry & Der Wir-Ing, who both couldn't make it to Wikimania 2026. In the presentation, Noé describes the active Wikipress outlets and how Wikipress projects can function.

From The Signpost and the German Kurier to the French Wiktionary publication, Actualités, to many others, Gasparini's presentation covered all active user-run publications, including less-known ones such as the Vikidia Gazette, the newsletter of Vikidia, an encyclopedia for youngsters. Noé described the Gazette Vikidia as "fun to read" with "lots of interviews."

Why do Wikipress projects matter?

Gasparini explained how Wikipress projects can be beneficial to the Wikimedia projects/communities they report on: “Some (Wikimedia) projects have these kinds of publication, others don’t, and the ones that have this kind of publication, have them for years. I think most of the projects should have these kind of spaces.” Gasparini also explained his thoughts on the historical place of Wikipress reporting and also how Wikipress publications reach a range of readers from the deeply involved to the slightly curious: “My idea is that people read it, and there's a cycle of people that know Wikipress and read Wikipress. The core is active editors, but also people from outside of the community...the signpost is read by people that don't contribute to English Wikipedia but they want to know what's it happening there… It's also for the future because the issues are not read only when they're published, but they also read in the future, for the next generation to know what was happening at that time. It's like history ongoing, so it's not only a publication for the moment it's published, but for the long term.” Gasparini also touched on the lack of support for people writing about Wikipedia, explaining: “there's no wiki journalist, that doesn't exist as a position.” On the importance of a Wikipress in relation to mainstream press coverage, Noé explained: “if we want people to talk about what we do...we have to… write it.”

What gets published in a Wikipress?

Gasparini defined a Wikipress as a “specific as a kind of press… that the readership can modify or can alter in a way.” He also highlighted the range of styles between the Wikipresses between the different languages, explaining how some outlets publishe columns with a point of view, encouraging debate while others don't. Gasparini explains that The Kurier is more like a village pump, with long debates while the French publications are less engaged in debate. Noé also explained how Wikipress projects can be a space for discussion, sharing a slide of a list compiled by Lane Rasberry on the 10 most discussed articles on The Signpost. (See below) Gasparini explained how Wikipress articles and projects can be places for discussion, which is one big positive effect from them.

Historically, Wikipress projects have published a range of material including but not limited to: news, traffic report, media coverage, community reports, how to edit advice, help guides, edit suggestions, interviews, games, jokes, to job offers, and more. In terms of positive reinforcement, Noé touched on how Wikipress projects can amplify unsung maintenance work: “we also want to explain what is maintenance work, what is invisible jobs we do in the community to make the project, just not collapse and, no one tells this story, if we... don't do it. So we have to u take some time to say okay look... this people or this group made this work, no one knows they did that, but it's what made the project alive.”

Challenges of running a Wikipress project

Noé listed some problems or hurdles that Wikipress journalists and editors come against:

• time consuming
• writing stories take times
• shoot the messenger when sharing bad news
• Often thankless. Noé explained: “it's really rare that people (give) feedback about what we do, and it can be hard to maintain our motivations”

How are Wikipress projects run?

Noé shared advice on starting a Wikipress. Usually managed by two to eight people, Noé expressed a desired to see new Wikipress publications! Do you want to start a new Wikipress project? Or contribute to an old one? Don't know where to start? Reach out to Noé, he can help!

After the presentation, Noé hosted a Question, Answer, & Comment session in the room, taking questions from audience members.

Q&A&C Session Summary

Question: Did you exchange with other people in German Wikipedia or other other languages to know how they how they do it? Why are there so many people reading them and not in French? (Question background info from presentation: There are significantly more pageviews on the English and German Wikipress outlets vs the French Wikipress outlets.)

Noé Answer: Yes, I discussed with my two coursers and for the German publication for the Kurier, he told me because there's debates and it's like the village pump or the bistro for French one. So people go there, not that much for the news, but for the debates and controversies. Am I right? So that's why people are going there. And for the signpost, it's also because the last issue is on the first page and they just change the content of the page dynamically. So if people want to read the the past issues, they arrived on the same page. So I think the number of people reading the last issue is not correct because it's also includes readers of the previous issues. But I don't know because there's no network of people doing this and most of those people are fail people(?). We don't talk to each other.

Q/Comment: hello... first question, what you think about Wikipress? I think it's something which is important in our communities because we are the symbol of that our communities are living. There are people who are making some good initiatives, into interesting projects, and that's a way to put...the spotlight on the communities. That's something which is very very good, and thank you to have organized this session. What I see as a Wikijournalist is that we need different kinds of people, people who are motivated to write, but also people who are able to give some ideas. So if even if you don't participate in the Wikipress, if you are listening about some projects or interesting news that you have hear, feel free to share it, and it can help to enrich the different newspapers and the newsletters.

Last point what you said Noé is that it takes a lot of time to write the Wikipress and sometimes it can have a decrease of motivation. So if it's the the case, if you want to to stop, that's not a problem. We have seen in the French community newsletters with the Le Wikimag and the RAW, as we said before, for the RAW, we had two people we were publishing it (for) a few years, and then they stopped because they didn't have enough time. But it was not a bad point because it helped the opportunity for others to take charge. So if you if you want to pass the opportunity to other people, that's something which is not bad news, that other people can take take it afterwards.

Noé A: Yeah, you're right. It's a long run. We are doing this for 10 years now and we hope to do it for the next 10 years. So it will not be the same people that do all the issues.

Q/C: Adding to what you said about writing things about, about writing things about things you discovered. It's about making your community aware of things that you find relevant, you find useful, you find interesting... We read the press so we look at what the rest of the world says about our wikis. We read the bulletin, as well, published by the foundation and also tech news to know which changes are coming. We also read the other press outlets, of course, the signpost, The Kurier, in order to get inspired by what other communities do. Something I know well, I work for the movement, so I know that a lot of communities are just alone, and very often you have no idea of the good ideas that are happening elsewhere.

Creating a press system, like this, allows your community to grow because you will open the minds by picking an essay that was interesting at the English Wikipedia, by discovering an initiative that was started by a WikiMedia Foundation team, for instance, or by a Wiki you have no contact with. This is really a way to enrich your community. So don't think big, I think looking at what exists is a good inspiration as a press system. Looking at a signpost could be quite impressive. Looking at a Kurier or the RAW is equally impressive. Start small. Maybe you know just list things that were interesting and try to publish them regularly. It's a very good start, and then you will find friends that could also care about this and we will help, they will help you. We have a few users at French Wikipedia who make big contributions for the publication, like you, thank you, and we also have people who just come and say, "Hey, I found this." And that's all. And then we care about it. We read it. We put it into the issue. So don't overthink it. Think about starting something... Yes, I was the one who told Noe, the goal is to have at least one new publication on a Wiki in six months and Noe thinks it will be, well shorter than that, so please help (him) be right.

Noé A: I'm not an editor, I'm a maintainer, in some way, because the writing, the choices in the editorial part, are done by the community. One other person is doing the stats, at some point we ask how many pages have pictures, he creates a query to have the quantity of pictures in the pages in the project because we never knew that before that. And every month we have the new number of pages with pictures. And at some point, we asked the English Wiktionary community and how many pictures do you have, and they have much more. So we had a new challenge, to be better than them. But knowing this kind of thing only arrives when you have a place to publish it. Having it every month may create more motivation to go in this direction and say okay this is the kind of content we never knew we need, but knowing that, let's go. That's something that's great and... will make the community grow together.

Q: Hi, thanks Noe, for the presentation... My question is you talked about the fact that for French speaking projects, there are lots of different wikijournals, but some projects don't have them. I don't know if there is if there is one for wikiuniversity or wikisource but if people want to create them, it will be it will make more Wikijournals in French speaking projects. Do you think we need one big journal for all the projects and try to all work together, in the same, like trans-projects wikijournal and, or, is it okay to have a lot of little wiki journals? Maybe it's one guy or like that maintaining it. So what do you think about it?

Noé A: Yeah, I have an idea, as a French people, about this because in France, we have the national publication and the regional ones, and a lot of people buy the national ones for large topic, and the local ones, because they talk about their life. I think the publication about that is better for people in Qiktionary because they talk about their local life, and having both is not, something that people have to choose between reading one or reading the other, they will pick what they want to to read in those. And I'm quite sure most of the readers are just picking and I know the guy that make the mistakes check in the French Wiktionary is just coming for the pictures. He doesn't read it and it's okay. People can just come for the pictures, and that's fine. But so I don't think if a community starts a new one, it will create a more messy situation, with chaos and, no, you will just talk to the people that are part of this community. The other question, do we need a publication for French Wikisource or for the global Wikisource? So last year at the Wikiconference, I made a talk about this... another topic I discussed with a lot of people at the wikiconference about having a press something, but the way of writing with a common ground for all the communities is to make it all in English, and it's not local anymore. So at some point it can be good to have more in the diff because diff is this space but the local publication will bring more emotions for the people in these communities, I think, but it's a controversy. Thank you.

Q: I'm not sure if you mentioned that already, when you started the act, how many were you like how many editors to get it go off the ground? Like because that's always a problem, getting getting it started. How many people do you need? One person is probably not good enough because it's a very limited perspective. But yeah, how many?

Noé A: In 2015, I was in the US, at this point, and I didn't start the French Wictionary (Wikipress project) actually, it was two other people, because they drink beer together, like most of the projects that start in a bar, so they were drinking and saying okay, we need to start this, and so I participated in the first issue, and then, I got involved much more, but another guy made the logo, and it's kind of the logo of the Wiktionary but with colors. So it was like okay, we have a logo, let's go and the title was like because in the past, someone created this space, so they refresh the name the name of the the page, and yeah there was there was two to three people, and it was just translation of the village pump of other Wiktionaries. We say, oh look this community is talking about this, this community is talking about that, and no one in the press is talking about our project, so we will not have anything from the press, but at some point we may. It was really short, and there were the top 10 of the most read the most famous article of the past month, we didn't keep this section in the in the journal, but it was something like top 10 most active article, most read, and yeah it was very short, but two to three people are maybe enough. So have a drink, and anything you want to drink, and just go for it with a page. And we start in March or April, and the the issue in July was July/August, because the people that create the page say, okay, we're in vacation so we will in holidays we will not do like two issues because it's summer time and stuff, but other people came and say, okay we have free time now so we we're in! So we we did two issues and we keep the rhythm, with one in July and one in August, because other people came and say okay now now we can do it. So maybe, it may happen the same way that people arrived when they... can be part of it, you never know.

C: Hello, good morning. I have a question from the chat online, but also a comment from me. Just a little correction, because I work with GLAM and we do have an active newsletter, actually this month in GLAM, and just last month for example we had like 24 reports from countries in it. It's probably one of the most active ones and it has been published since 2011 by Romain (sp?). If you have GLAM activities, museums, libraries, archives and museums, please contribute to it, because it's open for new members. I just wanted to like share that.

Q: Sophia from the chat asked: Can any user on Wikipedia contribute to the Wikipress?? Also, she asked later, do you have to talk exclusively about Wikipedia related content on the Wikipress?

Noé A: So for the signposts there's a process, you suggest your idea and there's a committee that will accept the way you want to talk about and they will help you to write it, the proper way. For some other ones, you just add your words and anyone can participate, in the French Wiktionary one, we even had a publication by people that are not registered. So you don't have to have an account to participate, and also you can suggest a topic, and say look it can be nice to talk about this topic because I don't understand why you do this in this way. People can ask questions, and other people will write it, or you can co-author articles about the topics. This is the list of the most commented articles and most of those are about ethical issues, or topics that are connected with what we do but not that much into our community. You can talk about all the other publications that may impact your work. So in French Wiktionary, we talk about the academic frances dictionaries, that are outside of our world, but that may impact our work. In Wikipedia, you can talk discuss about AI, that may have an impact on your work and you could talk about all those topics that may be adjacent to the community. It's really up to you what you want to talk about.

C: There is also a newsletter for the Wikimedia library.

C: I think it should be more widespread because lots of the communities are isolated in every country and so it should be, you know, like on a banner when you go into Wikipedia, or something like that.

Noé A: I do agree that's why I'm here, right now. At some point I went to the French Wikipedia village pump and said, look we have this newsletter about French Wiktionary and the first reply was, but you are on Wikipedia. So it wasn't nice and for each new post, I say sorry for the disappointment, but we still do that. Please come. There is nice pictures. And after 10 years, I don't do that anymore. And no one complained about me posting this. But at first, trying to make some advertisement about Wikipress, wasn't well received. And still on French Wikipedia, I know there's some intent, and some people that say, well, you do that. You're part of the community, I'm not part of. Yeah, you do that, but we don't really care. Uh, it's not a fight. It's just people ignoring this aspect of the project. And the large community on the Wikimedia projects, I don't know for people that have never heard of this, why they never heard of about this. And some answers may be that diff is on another platform and you may never went to this platform. And for others, I don't know how we where to put the banners.

Q/C: To add to that, I'm curious as well, because you talk about on wiki and newsletter (platforms), have you experimented with other platforms or channels? Also, a question to all of you: do you prefer to read the journals on wiki or coming on your email newsletter? ...I help write for the Wikimedia Foundation bulletin and it's on meta, and you can subscribe to it on your talkpage, but we also post the same thing on diff, so that a wider community can also see it, and if you're subscribed to diff on email, you can also see it. I don't know if you've experimented with channels, and you think some channels are better, or some channels are are not worth pursuing, or how?

Noé A: Okay, there was a Wikipedia planet at some point that was a place to federate all the press. But the problem is, for the one in French Wiktionary, we use template, to make it fancy, and the template will not move with it. So we don't publish it as a newsletter, or in another space, because of the templates.

Noé A: I had 10 questions at first and one that was not on the list is the impact because I have no answer for this question. I'll be glad to discuss about this issue because we don't have measure of impact of what we do for 10 years now. When I say I think people are more concerned by the community or have more culture about the project or are involved in more collective project, I don't know for sure, maybe it's for other reasons, I don't know and, for my sanity, I think it's better to not have any measure of impact

C: About acknowledging that other newspapers exist and knowing there could be a network, at the bottom of the French publication, we listed the other publications, and I believe we are the only ones to do this. So it could be nice if the signpost, the Kurier or even the actual could have that that link to other publications because it's a great way to know that other things exist within the movement. 

Noé A: In the past, one French Wikimedian made a live Twitch (stream) where he read the newspapers and he clicked on the links when he he wanted too. It was really his own way of reading the press, but it was really interesting to see him read the press and it was like 1 hour or more, like 1 hour and a half, and I think it was easier to read it, but most people may like it better seeing people displaying this and commenting and having his own way of reading this. And this is also a way to make it open to other communities. It's another way of consuming news... he did that for a year or two but he stopped then.

Q: What what about the communication by about, or by, affiliates? Some community are so small, they tends to be compact. So for example some of this type of communication can be moved to communication from affiliates, but in a way something like that, you can also see on Wikidata, like I suppose that Wikimedia Germany is the one doing something on that side. So what what about the communication from affiliates in this picture?

Noé A: Um I won't be able to answer for all affiliates. I will answer for one group of affiliates that are French speaking affiliates that create a structure that is WikiFranca and WikiFranca have a part about communication that is internal communication. So one part is about feedback about the activities made by the affiliates but it's different that the part that is about statistics, about what the community do, it's mostly about the outreach, or the collective workshop they did, and how it went well, and this is not what I want to read.

C: Definitely, I mean, but sometimes there's also something else, there's some similar content to this in some other situation.

Noé A: The way we may do it with internal communication, is also saying when (events) didn't go well, our failures or mistakes, or when we try to do a workshop and no one came, and we need to say this, to help other people to create activities that will be a success, and this is not what an affiliate will do, or they will do it, but not write it.

Noé A: At some point I (embraced) the word archive because I think these publications are part of the archive about what we do in the movement. We need to archive what we do. This is the kind of publication that creates archives, and when they are outside, they will just be closed at some point and we may lose some archive, and that's a problem.

C: That is absolutely true. At least for the three that I said one is probably, now, it's archived on internet archive, but I think it's closed.

Noé A: Thanks to our friends but it's our mission to do this. We not have to rely on other people doing the archiving.

Q/C: Hello, on French Wikipedia I realize that we don't speak don't speak a lot about Wikimedia France activity or Wikimedia Cameroon or other affiliates and they don't come either to write some papers about what they do, and so everyone communicates on their our channel, and the members of the French Wikimedia community who are not in an affiliate, not an affiliate member, do not know what affiliates are doing.

Noé A: Yes. And for affiliates in French, I can only say for French community that the Swiss, Canada or France, affiliates don't publish on Wiki neither. So if you want to have knowledge about the activities of the Canadian French speaking community, you have to go to their own newsletter. Yeah, well, this is the local part I talked about earlier, that it's also nice to have your own publication, and to go to it when you are interested in this specific area of knowledge... I'm really happy to answer to any or more reflections or questions. If you want to start your own wiki press, please come to me, or to other people that do that and ask for help, and we may be glad to help you. And thank you for attention in this session.