What tasks are involved in rolling over topic challenges?

Here is a checklist. It's community wiki so anybody with sufficient rep can edit to correct or update. Some tasks depend on others, so this order generally works well to ensure that the dependencies are taken care of.

Determine the next topic challenge

• Check the answers to the New Literature SE Topic Challenge Suggestions Thread to see which of the suggested topics has the most votes.
• If there is more than one answer at the top spot, the answer date is the tiebreaker. The earliest answer with that number of votes wins. Check for post date, not edited date.
• The selected suggestion becomes the topic challenge beginning the next month. That is to say, if today is January 1, then the highest voted answer will be the topic challenge for February–March.

Announce the next topic challenge

• Go to the most recent topic-challenge announcement on the Literature Meta site

• Click on the "Edit" link for that question and copy the text from the edit box for that announcement

• Click "Cancel" to close the edit box without making any changes

• In a different window or tab, create a new question on the Literature meta site to announce the selected topic challenge and paste the copied text into the question body.

• Update the vote count in the second paragraph to reflect the correct number of upvotes and downvotes that the chosen suggestion received

• Update the months to the correct ones for the upcoming challenge in these places:

  • In the first paragaph
  • In two places as needed under What's a topic challenge?

• Update the challenge number and, when needed, the year in the second paragraph. I.e., change "first challenge fully in 2025" to "second challenge" or "last challenge fully in 2025" or "challenge straddling 2025 and 2026" as appropriate.

• Replace the old topic with the new topic in these places:

  • The large text immediately above What's a topic challenge?
  • In the answer to What's a topic challenge?, including a link to the Wikipedia or other informative page about the relevant author, work, genre, etc.
  • Under How can I take part?
  • In the very last bullet point, under What's next?

• Update the relevant tags under How can I take part? This takes some thought, as what tags to use varies considerably by topic. Check previous announcements to get some ideas for what tags to mention.

• Update the proposer's name, adding a link to their profile, and link to their proposal in the New Topic Challenge Suggestions thread

• Using the same edit/cancel trick described above, copy the text of the original proposal and paste it below the list of suggested tags

• Update the months under What's next? to the appropriate ones

• Check all links and references

• Proofread and post the announcement

• Flag the original proposal at the New Topic Challenge Suggestions thread for deletion

Create an answer to the newly-created announcement

• Answer the announcement you just created. Click on "Community wiki" so anybody with sufficient rep can edit it.

• Using the same edit/cancel trick, copy the answer from the most recent prior topic challenge announcement and paste it into the answer you created in the previous steps

• Update "all questions posted" to link to the correct search (this can be tricky if there's no single tag that applies to all the works covered by the challenge, for example with the challenge for Mediæval Arthurian Literature).

• Update the month in the two sentences under the numbered list to the appropriate one

• Note: Nothing immediate depends on this task, so technically it could be done at some later time.

Update the New Topic Challenge Suggestions thread

• Move the challenge that's listed under Upcoming Topic Challenge to the last position under Currently Ongoing Topic Challenges.

• Move the first challenge under Currently Ongoing Topic Challenges to the end of the list of Previous Topic Challenges.

• Create a new item for the now-empty Upcoming Topic Challenge list, linking to the announcement for the new topic challenge, the original proposal, and the user's profile.

Close out the challenge that just ended

• Edit the answer to the announcement of the just-completed topic challenge

• Add all the questions asked during the challenge to the numbered list

• Delete the placeholder list item # 100

• Update the vote counts, view counts, and answered counts

• If any relevant posts were made to the Tumblr blog, add the links here; if not, delete the section about Tumblr

Miscellaneous

• Ask a moderator to create a community event link for the upcoming challenge

• Ask an owner of chat to update the pinned announcement of ongoing topic challenges. This involves:

  • Removing stars from the old pinned announcement
  • Creating and pinning a new announcement with the appropriate links.

That's ... quite a bit. However, taking care of it all generally takes less time than it took to type out this answer. The fiddliest bit is creating the announcement for the next topic challenge, but hopefully, this checklist will make the entire process go quicker.