Talk:Magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Virginia felt up and down U.S. east coast, Pentagon evacuated

Twitter reports from as far north as New Hampshire, early indications are a 5.4 magnitude quake centered near Richmond, VA. LtPowers (talk) 18:03, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * CNN says 5.8. LtPowers (talk) 18:08, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * USGS says 5.9. --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Merge
In terms of merge, wouldn't this title or some combo title make more sense? The magnitude of the earthquake is good to include, but it was felt in far more than Washington. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:34, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Does anyone know exactly how a merge is usually performed on Wikinews?Ryan Vesey (talk) 18:42, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure. This article (the one we're discussing) has been already published, so all other redundant articles have to be merged into this article. The sources used in the other article should be added to this article's list of sources. Ragettho (talk) 18:46, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Ok, I added the sources and am merging useful content.Ryan Vesey (talk) 18:48, 23 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Why is the title "near Washington, D.C." when the quake was pretty solidly in Virginia? Isn't that likely to be confusing? It was 100 miles from D.C. :/ --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:49, 23 August 2011 (UTC)
 * It should read like "earthquake near Charlottesville, VA..." It has been downgraded to 5.8, but numbers have not been updated online.
 * I changed it to "in Virginia". Initially I was following a source that said "near Washington", but "in Virginia" now makes much more sense. Ragettho (talk)

Speculation
Possible speculation that Washington Monument is tilting http://foxnewsinsider.com/tag/washington-monument/ I assume we should wait for some more confirmation.Ryan Vesey (talk) 18:56, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Fox News
The amtrak information cited Fox News was seen on TV.Ryan Vesey (talk) 19:25, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

OR note
I was in Boston yesterday. Happened to be right down the street from this building which had concerns it may collapse. Turns out it always appeared that way. Anyways, photo added with a source to back up what I heard, which at times was conflicting. --Patrick M (TUFKAAP) (talk) 14:28, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Some concerns
First of all, the article was published when it was only one paragraph long, I believe the articles have to be at least two paragraphs long in breaking news situations, and three paragraphs long normally. Secondly, the reviewer added original report content, there were no real twitter sources provided but a short summary by a user that had rarely edited before the creation of this article, so far. The reviewer later reviewed his and another user's changes; the other user's changes may be acceptable, but reviewing his are not. Also, why are there so many sources in the article? Are they all really necessary? アンパロ Io ti odio! 20:01, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree, the article when published was too short to publish.
 * That second edit is addition of unverified information &mdash; there are no detailed reporter's notes as required for OR. As you point out, the user in question is not someone with a reputation at Wikinews, nor elsewhere I have to interject here.  The user you are trashing is Moonriddengirl, one of the most respected Wikipedians.  In fact, she is currently an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation Ryan Vesey (talk) 21:34, 24 August 2011 (UTC) &mdash; there's no unified account, so it doesn't signify that there are well-established accounts on other sister projects with the same name.  Personal reputation being a cornerstone of Wikinews that (in our profound form) is totally missing from the Wikipedian hive mindset, and probably is why some Wikipedians thing we're either insane, corrupt, or both.
 * The sighting of that third edit does, indeed, self-publish the aforementioned unverified information.
 * Mistakes were made here. The first two could be simple shortfall of experience; we all have to learn these things at some point.  I don't know what to make of the third one; it's potentially by far the most troubling, but that potential depends on what Ragettho's side of the story is.  So I really want to hear Ragettho's side of that story.  --Pi zero (talk) 20:43, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Oh, I think I can answer that last bit, about the number of sources. Information was, I understand, incrementally added, with sources coming along with the new information.  There are actually a great many comments in the article (you'll see, if you edit it) identifying which source specific details came from.  Ragettho was concerned enough about keeping track of it all that xe asked me, at one point, if I could do an independent review to double-check xem &mdash; but xe and I both separately came to the conclusion it probably wasn't practical.  --Pi zero (talk) 20:47, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Question for アンパロ on sources Why should there not be that many sources?  Should an entire wikinews article be based on only two sources?  That cuts out a lot of information.Ryan Vesey (talk) 21:37, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * (injecting a remark) The key question was whether they're really necessary; I suggested that every source on the list was probably used at the time that the corresponding information was incrementally added. Making them, presumably, necessary.  --Pi zero (talk) 21:45, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry. Its just that I have contributed twice to Wikinews and it seems like both times I (and others) have been criticized for being new; rather than receiving assistance for editing in the future.Ryan Vesey (talk) 21:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Hm? I wasn't criticizing you, I was offering information.  Did it seem like criticism from your side?  If it looked different from your side, that could be due to a cultural mismatch between Wikipedia and Wikinews &mdash; Wikipedia has AGF while Wikinews has accumulated personal reputation.  With Wikipedian AGF, one is immediately treated about as well as one can be, until and unless one takes heroic measures to earn mistrust.  But on Wikinews, we start out with open minds about you, and it's possible to work up from there to levels of individual reputation that are simply inconceivable within the Wikipedian framework.  But again, it's accumulated reputation.


 * Case in point: The user we're talking about who provided the twitter claim here is not being trashed; they simply haven't yet accumulated reputation here. (The user also isn't Moonriddengirl; we do know Moodriddengirl, but this is LtPowers we're talking about, and as I noted, there's no unified account so we don't know whether this is the same user as has accounts on en.wp and commons.)  Of course, that lack of accumulated reputation is only one small issue in all this; even if Moonriddengirl had provided that information, there should have been proper OR notes, and it was the reviewers responsibility not to accept the article content without such notes.  --Pi zero (talk) 22:15, 24 August 2011 (UTC)


 * WN:SG says "If there is significant breaking news whose article is likely to be expanded, do go ahead and write a short (but useful!) summary as breaking news, and tag it with breaking review." Publishing a short article like this was not a violation of current guidelines.
 * I did not add OR content. If you take a look at the diff, you'll see that I added a note saying that the info came from CNN. Furthermore, even if I did use the OR notes provided by LtPowers above, there wouldn't be a credibility issue because that user is active on at least two Wikimedia projects. (WP userpage)
 * I was hoping to leave my edit as "pending" and just sight subsequent revisions. I wasn't sure whether that worked or not (I had a feeling that it didn't), but I continued to review subsequent revisions because I was available to review them, other reviewers did not seem to be available, and the number of edits that needed to be sighted continued to grow quickly. There was not enough time to wait for another reviewer to check my edit. Furthermore, Moonriddengirl, Ryan Vesey, and particularly Kainaw, who are all respected contributors in other projects, continued to update the article to reflect further developments in the story. As such, the article — including my own text — has effectively been reviewed by multiple, reputable contributors. Ragettho (talk) 22:21, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Miscellaneous points.
 * I'd completely missed the point about CNN, and evidently so did Diego. Point taken.
 * We're suggesting it should have been a bit longer than that before being published.
 * I do understand your sense of need to review subsequent edits in fairly real time. The solution is to remove the stuff you can't self-sight, and review and sight a version later than the removal.
 * Although I do understand that you're glad to have had multiple eyes working on the article (so would I be!), don't lose track of the crucial fact those other people aren't reviewers. There are many facets to "reputation" that go into the Wikinews community's assignment of the reviewer bit [struck out: simplify], and you can't delegate your responsibility for the article; you were in fact the only reviewer on the scene.
 * [struck out: true but pointlessly argumentative] "Not time to wait for another reviewer" is, of course, not an acceptable reason for self-sighting; I do understand about not being sure whether one could sight a later edit without sighting an earlier one. I often wish we had the technical ability to do that.  [struck out: simplify] Again, the practical way around it is to take out the material you can't sight, then go through the other changes incrementally (without sighting intermediate steps) until you get up to the point in the edit history where you removed what you can't self-sight, and once you have a review-passing version that doesn't have the stuff you can't self-sight, sight that version.
 * The point about LtPowers doesn't matter in the event, because as you point out it was from CNN, but I note there's no obvious evidence that LtPowers is the same user who has those accounts on other projects, because there's no SUL for LtPowers. It took me a long time to learn how to check that.  Go to their contributions page, here Special:Contributions/LtPowers, and down at the bottom find a toolserver link for "SUL"; click it, and you get a page that lists accounts on other projects and notes there's no SUL.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 23:13, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * As usual when I foolishly rush myself, I come across sounding pompous, and consequently overly critical. I hate several portions of the above, which have grains of truth in them but come across way too strong; there's little I can do now, but I've tried to make it slightly less horrible by striking out some passages.  --Pi zero (talk) 23:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)