Talk:Press freedom watchdog 'outraged' by closure of Burundi radio station

Please note that the Reuters article contains a number of inaccuracies - please handle with care!

Rcameronw 20:54, 24 July 2005 (UTC) 20:53, 24 July 2005 (UTC)This page has been vandalised. After it was deleted the first time I reworked the CPJ press release content (which allafrica.com had merely syndicated) to put it in quotes, just to allay any concerns. But in any case there should be no issue of copyright issue here at all. The CPJ puts out this kind of press release precisely with the intention that it will be picked up and used for copy. I explained all this on the discussion page. But it got deleted again. Please think more carefully before you go deleting things!


 * It hasn't been deleted - click the history tab at the top to see previous revisions of the article. However, you have copied this page, which is © 2005 Committee to Protect Journalists. You need to re-write that in your own words. Dan100 (Talk) 21:02, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

How are the stories not the same? -- NGerda 21:15, July 24, 2005 (UTC)

Rcameronw 22:08, 24 July 2005 (UTC) 22:05, 24 July 2005 (UTC)It seems kind of ironic that an article about heavy-handed censorship is getting this kind of treatment! I have not copied the page, I have quoted from it. I appreciate that you're just trying to be vigilant but I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. The article now quotes from a press release, making it explicitly clear that we are quoting from a CPJ press release. This is what journalists do all the time. This is what wikinews does all the time. For example, and from the current headline article Tsunami_Warning_issued_for_Indian_Ocean_due_to_large_earthquake:

The U.S. National Earthquake Information Center said in a bulletin that "No tsunami threat exists to coastlines in the Pacific, however earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts located within a few hundred kilometers of the earthquake epicenter. As the center does not have sea level gauges outside the Pacific, they will will not be able to detect or measure a tsunami if one occurs. It can be assumed the danger has passed if no tsunami waves are observed near the epicenter within an hour of the earthquake."

Did the National Earthquake Information Center give explicit permission for this quote to be used?

Unless they did, and unless you're now saying that every attributed quote on wikinews has to be explicitly authorised by the people being quoted, you're applying a double standard with your objections to this article. The issues raised by the person who originally consigned this piece to wiki-purgatory were OTT and wrongheaded in the first place, but they have now been dealt with.
 * The U.S. National Earthquake Information Center is a part of the US goverment, making any work they do and any satements they release public domain. --Cspurrier 22:09, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

And when you see other quotes on Wikinews, they should always say "So and so told Reuters", or "Speaking to the BBC, Joe Average said...". What you did, however, was just copy and paste a press release. Dan100 (Talk) 22:11, 24 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Anyway, instead of arguing, you could've rewritten the article by now. Dan100 (Talk) 22:14, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Dan, the same thing holds true for yourself..why haven't you re-written it??? Paulrevere2005 19:07, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Rcameronw 08:19, 25 July 2005 (UTC) You may well be right. Perhaps I could have rewritten the thing in the time it took to explain why I think that the thing doesn't need rewriting. But this isn't just about the article itself, or the issue of press freedom in Burundi. It's also about sensible, proportionate and responsible editing by people like your good selves. So I think it's good and healthy to try and resolve this through discussion.

Cspurrier points out that the National Earthquake info center is part of the US government - therefore all their statements are public domain, and legitimately quotable. He's already indicated that he feels a press release from the international press freedom watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists is not "public domain" and can not be quoted on Wikinews. Does this mean that Wikinews can now only quote from government organisations?! Does this mean that Wikinews can no longer quote from organisations like the CPJ, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International? This rather smacks of bias to me.

It seems self-evident that a press release from a press freedom organisation, whose raison d'etre is to get their voice heard as widely as possible, is public domain. But just to make sure, I have now emailed the CPJ to ask for permission to quote from their press release. It seems like an absurd thing to have to do, but I will let you know what they say.

Dan100 says "what you did... was just copy and paste a press release". That's simply not true. I do take exception to heavy-handed editing based on assertions which are not true. I wrote the main bulk of the story myself. I spent considerable time researching and drawing on other sources for the story, including details of a French-language report from www.abarundi.org which I translated into English. I even checked out and referenced the claim that the officer who led the raid on the radio station had previously been linked to the 1993 assassination which led to the civil war that RPA is now helping, in its own small way, to bring to an end. What I did do was copy and paste extracts from a CPJ press release. After Cspurrier's first objection, I edited the article to put all such extracts in quotes, making it clear that they were quotes from a press release.

Dan100 says: And when you see other quotes on Wikinews, they should always say "So and so told Reuters", or "Speaking to the BBC, Joe Average said...".

If you actually took the trouble to read the article, you would see that this is exactly how it now reads, eg:

"The National Communications Council—known by its French acronym CNC—ordered RPA indefinitely closed on Friday, July 15, alleging that its recent election coverage was biased and that it had insulted the council. RPA director Alexis Sinduhije, a 2004 recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists' International Press Freedom Award, denied the council's allegation of bias and said the station would defy the ban", 'said the CPJ, in a press release.'

"No one is above the law. Sanctions must be taken against whoever breaks the law," the National Communications Council chairman Jean-Pierre Manda was quoted by Reuters as saying on Saturday.

I believe that this issue has now been resolved. If you feel that further edits are necessary, please do make them. I don't know how to remove the "copyvio" marker so I'd appreciate help from others on this. Other than the [error-ridden] note on the Reuters newswire, and the brief report on BBC monitoring, this latest development in the story has not yet been picked up by any other major English-language source, so it would be nice if Wikinews was still able to get the "scoop".

Moved from /temp
Having one more go at this. Wukuga Mungai, comms coordinator of the CPJ, has now replied to my email confirming permission to quote from their press release (?!?). See also: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy#Dan100 Rcameronw 08:37, 26 July 2005 (UTC)