Wikinews:Water cooler/policy

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[edit] Enable "flood flag"?

This could be very useful for administrators that are archiving articles on a large basis. Thoughts? Thunderhead 09:38, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Support implementation of this. It would be useful, especially where we are currently going through sighting old articles. --Skenmy ^talk 17:32, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Support Oh...this will be very handy. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 16:28, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Support Per Gilgamesh. Cirt (talk) 16:36, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Oppose This will jsut mean that admins can sneak in controversial edits - little benefit IMO Anonymous101^talk 19:46, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

We trust admins to not do this anyway - they have powers to delete, block, revert, protect, and whatnot. If we can't trust them not to misuse this tool then that person should not be an admin! --Skenmy ^talk 19:49, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Oppose Instances where this would have been useful have been few and far between. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 20:06, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I can think of at least one instance where it will be useful - the tagging and sighting of old articles. That's about 20 edits, often more, that could be hidden. --Skenmy ^talk 10:49, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Oppose seems unnecessary and, given the current lack of necessity, too prone to abuse. Martinp23 (talk) 12:34, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Did you even read my comments above? --Skenmy ^talk 19:03, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Just to clarify-This would only be used after discussion (ex on WN:ALERT I need flood flag to do blah, gets flood flag, only does stuff related to that, releases flood flag), and that if people wished to check up on admins to make sure they aren't naughty, all edits still appear on irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikinews and RC if show bot edits is set to true. With that said, I more or less support, but have no strong opinion as its need cases are somewhat weak (having 20 edits in rc is not that disruptive imho) Bawolff ☺☻ 20:28, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Support In that case I support. As long as there is some way for non-admins to check up on them, it's fine. Gopher65_talk 16:42, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What is our policy on interview formats?

There currently is a federal election campaign going on in Canada, just as there is south of the border. For this campaign, I decided to contact all registered candidates across the country, with a series of questions.

(Example: CanadaVOTES: Liberal David Remington running in Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox & Addington)

The newly returned Amgine has suggested that none of the interviews should be published, as "they're all the same". (The reason for one set of questions: all candidates have an equal chance to answer; different questions for different parties can show the bias of the reporter.) On my talk page, he objected to the medium (email) and quantity of this project.

He says the article must have a backgrounder of the candidate and the riding. There are 308 federal ridings in Canada. There are two parties running candidates in 307 ridings, two running candidates in 308 ridings, and the Bloc is running about 75. That makes a potential for 1305 interviews, even before the Christian Heritage Party, Progressive Canadian Party, independents, etc respond.

I simply do not have the time to write that many profiles, and still manage to publish all of the responses.

I've election articles twice before without complaint.

The first was for 2006 city council hopefuls in Toronto, Mississauga, and Brampton, Ontario, and again in 2007 for Ontario provincial MPP candidates.

A quote from one interview was even cited in the Toronto Star, Canada's highest circulation newspaper.

Have related policies changed since 2006 and 2007? Was a policy restricting this style of article simply not enforced, the first two spurts? -- Zanimum (talk) 18:44, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Try to answer the questions of who, what, where, when, why and how. (Wikinews Style Guide)

Commonly, news content should contain the "Five Ws" (who, what, when, where, why, and also how) of an event. There should be no questions remaining. (Wikipedia 'News')

Lesson 2: The Five Ws of Journalism (Scholastic Grade 5-6 Lesson plan)

- Amgine | ^t 19:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I think these interviews are great asset and I have no problem with them being publish. Ideally it would be great to have a brief intro but the interview portion far outweighs any benefits from an intro. --PatrickFlaherty (talk) 00:43, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, Patrick. -- Zanimum (talk) 19:19, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Amgine, must you be so perpetually condescending? Am I supposed to feel embarrassed that some random grade 5 lesson plan "proves me wrong"? The Toronto Star runs a special section similar to this, every year. It goes riding-by-riding, looking at the basic facts and campaign tenets of each campaigner. Are they wrong too?

Note that the Toronto Star needs (at its peak) 150 staff members to run content on the election, and they primarily cover 47 local ridings, ridings that they are familiar with. (public editor Kathy English, "The Star's 2008 election platform", September 20, 2008) There's only two of us, currently doing Canadian election coverage.

On another wing, Wikipedia lists news simply as: "any new information or information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience." Format of my postings aside, the interviews do present information on current events to a mass audience. -- Zanimum (talk) 19:19, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I believe there is a notable difference between what news is, and what a news article should include. I'm also of the opinion the style guide is a policy on Wikinews designed to ensure minimal journalistic standards and to support writers in presenting a consistent style for our readers. - Amgine | ^t 05:40, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

My view is that it does need an intro that is individual but the individualised bit need not be too long. Perhaps only a few lines, a basic word or two. We can gather the rest from the interview. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 20:53, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree entirely, Blood Red Sandman. "MP candidate schmoe is a businessman/opthamologist/political activist in City. Xe is running in the Blah riding, which covers portions of Province, including Popcenter and Burbia." Just a brief backgrounder with, if possible, mention of what party the incumbent is from. (For United Staters like myself, it's important to know that voters in Canada vote for the party more than the individual candidate and it's not unusual for a candidate to be "parachuted in" from some other province - they don't need to live in the riding they are running in.) - Amgine | ^t 05:22, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Conflict of interest

Hi, I've reviewed the conflict of interest policy and would like to propose a few revisions. A summary is available at Wikinews_talk:Conflict_of_interest#Revision.3F. Requesting feedback. Durova (talk) 19:19, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Date of article and date of publication - should we adopt a UTC policy?

Currently, Wikinews' official policy in the Style Guide calls for articles to be dated as: "The date given on an article is should be of the day on which the article was published." However, it leaves it somewhat open as it also says "the dateline may either refer to the location of where the article was filed from or where the event happened even if the writer was not physically present."

This basically means that someone in Hawaii (UTC-10) could contribute an article to Wikinews and have it appear further back in the archive than a story that originated in New Zealand (UTC+13 summers), but was added up to 23 hours later. To me this is absurd.

Further complicating the issue, is that some editors have taken the stance, that since Wikinews now gets listed on Google News, we cannot change the date (ie date bump to the actual date of publication) to match UTC, even though that has been standard practice in the past. This page even says "policy is based on the accepted practices of the day on Wikinews, often these might not be written down." If we can still change the content of the article why can't we change the date?

This has resulted in some minor edit-warring — see history of "Ship sunk by Indian navy was a fishing boat, says owner" for an example — but it has also resulted in some outright abuse, as in this article "UN reports condemn West Bank settlement" which was published on November 23 (UTC), with November 21 as the article date.

To solve any confusion and make it absolutely clear for everyone, I suggest that we adopt a UTC policy for dating articles. That is, the article should carry the date that corresponds to UTC, regardless of where it was written and what date it was there or the date in the locale of the article's subject. This way it will be absolutely clear to any contributor (and not just the main contributor or the reviewer) what the correct date should be. Also, it will allow the date to be fixed quickly and by anyone if it happened to be wrong when {{publish}} was added.

UTC is already on every time stamp in every log and in every signature, regardless of where that user may be.

I welcome any thoughts on this. Suggestions for how the Style Guide should word the date policy to avoid dis-ambiguity are also welcomed. Cheers, --SVTCobra 00:57, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Agree with this suggestion by SVTCobra (talk · contribs). Cirt (talk) 00:59, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely. Dates / days within the article can reference the local time zone. But the {{date}} header should be UTC. {{dateline}} is only for original reporting: we need to think hard about how we use that, as posting a UTC date would be confusing. --InfantGorilla (talk) 11:43, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

For our regular contributors articles will be published on the date of creation. There are eminently sensible reasons for allowing an article to be forward-dated as local sources may have tomorrow's date on them versus what is currently UTC. You must also bear in mind that the display of the main page is based on the user's timezone settings, not UTC. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 12:28, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

The date of creation is ideal if an article gets completed, reviewed and published in a timely manner. However, since I returned to Wikinews a couple of weeks ago, I have noticed that this rarely happens. Therefore a newly published story with yesterday's date would slip down the front page listing, and may actually go unnoticed.

Forward dating articles from the eastern hemisphere seems relatively harmless, but I don't see the benefits.

When you say 'the user's timezone settings' do you mean their browser settings, or their mediawiki preferences?

--InfantGorilla (talk) 20:24, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I was always under the impression that the only thing user time zone settings ( from special:preferences) were used for was dates on RC and diffs. I was under the impression that the main page used UTC, as we wanted it to be consistent [and if i recall, stuff like {{LOCALTIMESTAMP}} was just recently introduced, so it has just recently became possible to make it local time zone]. Bawolff ☺☻ 23:34, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Even if user time zone settings come into play, I don't thing that should preclude us from adopting a UTC policy. Afterall, I hope that we get read by people who are not advanced Wiki users who have customized their settings. Our target audience should not be each other but people who haven't registered. Also, some stories take two-three days in development. Publishing them with the date of creation seems crazy. We model many things we do after real newspapers. Newspapers don't insert articles into yesterday's edition, even if the journalist had written the article a day or two ago. It is dated when published. --SVTCobra 23:51, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

You're misinterpreting what I said if you think I mean publishing with a stale date. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 23:57, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

OK, but what do you mean by "date of creation" then? Was "UN reports condemn West Bank settlement" published with a "stale date"?--SVTCobra 00:01, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

No, I refer to stuff that is speedily created and published. Not the horror stories that are beaten senseless before becoming publishable. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 00:05, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] 2008 Prairie meteoroid

Wikinews: 2008 Prairie meteoroid I was in the process of relating to wikinews an article on wikipedia which was in my Saturday's local newspaper as where a meteoroid had landed had just been found!!! The search team is still there scouring for more artifacts before the snow comes. There is a $10,000 reward from meteor collectors for such meteroid finds. But the article was deleted speedily as it wsn't news for a find which just happened, they just found where it landed!!!! Article 2008 Prairie meteoroid Ah well :-( It would have been nice to have a new Canada news story on the portal but C'est la vie. Kind Regards SriMesh | talk 20:23, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

It was a copyright violation of Wikipedia content (we don't have compatible licenses).
It was nothing like a news story, it had an encyclopedic title and was not a report, hence notnews deletion. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 20:35, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikinews:Water cooler/policy

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Contents

[edit] Enable "flood flag"?

[edit] What is our policy on interview formats?

[edit] Conflict of interest

[edit] Date of article and date of publication - should we adopt a UTC policy?

[edit] 2008 Prairie meteoroid

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