Talk:Researchers find preserving spotted owl habitat may not require a tradeoff with wildfire risk after all

The corroborating articles seem to be cropping up this afternoon and evening. Collaboration is very welcome. If anyone can find a source (other than the old NYT article I read back in the day) corroborating the bit about habitat preservation for the cute owl also saving ugly species, that'd be great. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:51, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Yuba.net
Here is their About Us page. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:21, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The Yuba is the only one that didn't look like a copy of the university press release. Probably because it was written by one of the other organizations responsible for the study, which means it's not fully independent.  I am providing it here in case anyone wants to go through the quotations offered and add or replace. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:23, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Replaced Yuba with press release straight from the forestry station website, so whether or not they're a real news source is moot. Why use a middleman? Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Dates
It took some digging to find out what was going on with this one. The official publication date: December 1, 2017, almost two months from now. Date the study was made available for purchase online: September 28 or so. Date of press releases from the organizations that performed the study: October 4 and 5, 2017. So they opened the door last week but waited until this week to yell "THE DOOR IS OPEN."

We've been discussing freshness and science articles over by the water cooler. Most of you know my view on this, and I wouldn't hit review if I didn't think it was fit for Wikinews (which means as of this post I'm waiting on independent corroboration and this could all be moot), but I want this issue front and center so no one gets surprised or feels tricked. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:54, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I guess we could treat the event as "reaching the public eye this week." Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:10, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree. Most of the material seems to have been published on October 5th and 6th, so it's within the standard 3 day limit. As for it being "released" (but not publicized) earlier, I always like to bring up the cases where someone dies, but it doesn't hit the news for 2 months because no one knew it happened. The story starts when people hear about it, not when the event happens. That's even more true in science reporting. &mdash; Gopher65talk 17:42, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Notes on sourcing
A few things to streamline the process:


 * I don't want this one to get away from us, so I've stopped waiting for someone to write an article from scratch: Multiple publications have endorsed the same two press releases by publishing them.
 * The Sierra Sun Times article is talking about another study; it's used for the mention of that study and of the three types of owl.
 * The NPR source is used solely to support the statement that barred owls were outcompeting spotted owls.

Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Gotta request discussion on this one.

Many different news sources, independent of each other, are reprinting the same two press releases put out by the research team. The press releases are often copied word for word. Does this satisfy Wikinews' independent corroboration requirement? Thoughts? Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:30, 6 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Well, the same article syndicated in multiple places is still just one article, no help for independent corroboration. Keep in mind, we want independent sources for a variety of reasons &mdash; basically, it can help bolster four out of five of the review criteria (excepting, perhaps, Style).  --Pi zero (talk) 21:00, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Well I'll give this another check later but it looks like the dating issue may be moot after all. A pity.  I think we all needed cute animals not burning houses down after a week like this. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:25, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

did you find an independent corroborating source for this? I would be delighted to hear you had. The other option is to kick this article to "prepared" and see if anything interesting happens at the official release date on Dec. 1. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:38, 8 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Here's my thought on this: every science news story (or almost every one) comes from a single press release. That's just the way it is, because that's the way the information is released. Multiple news organizations then take that press release and write their own take on it, but it all ultimately comes from a single source, pretty much always. That doesn't mean it can't be reported on, any more than when an event happens in a remote area of the world, and it just so happens that the only journalist on the ground is a single BBC reporter who was on vacation. Every article published is going off the word of that one reporter, but we still count it as "multiple sources", because one is written by BBC and the other by Reuters. &mdash; Gopher65talk 17:45, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4353828 [Passed]

 * One thing that I'll note is that I'm a little iffy on the title of this page. Is it ok? Who=Researches. What=Owls. Where=Habitats. I think it satisfies those, and while it doesn't list a country, I'm not sure that a biology article really *needs* to list a country in the title like a political article does. I'm still a little bit unsure about it, but I *think* that it's ok for publication. &mdash; Gopher65talk 18:13, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * No I did not take the species names from Wikipedia. I classified that under "general knowledge," seeing this one on this science website and that one in that bird book, but if you think it would be better to list Audobon or something I can certainly do that.
 * I generally don't mind when other people change the titles, but I suppose there will be enough readers who don't know the spotted owl is from the Pacific Northwest. The easiest way would be to say "U.S. researchers find..." even though that says where the research teams are from and not where the owl lives.  We could also say "Researchers find preserving spotted owl habitat may not require a tradeoff with wildfire risk in the Pacific Northwest after all" or "Researchers find preserving spotted owl habitat in western North America may not require a tradeoff with wildfire risk after all." Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:35, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree that scientific names are general knowledge since they can be checked easily. This page from the US Forest Service gives the common and scientific names of the three subspecies. IUCN lists a fourth subspecies from Mexico, juanaphillipsae. —mikemoral (talk) 20:04, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The notion of "obvious" facts has two levels. The ones we explicitly wave the need for sourcing on are those that are so obvious that really pretty-much everybody knows them, so a reviewer is very unlikely to have to have the slightest doubt about them and thus have any need to look them up.  Our standard example of an obvious fact, "Paris is in France", is obvious in that sense.  It is neither necessary nor even desirable to provide sourcing in a news article for the statement "Paris is in France".  But then there are facts that are stable enough that they aren't actually controversial, but most reviewers won't know for sure without investigating somehow.  Like "the scientific name for the spotted owl is Strix occidentalis".  Some statements like that actually are controversial, most aren't, but even if it isn't, most people don't carry it around in their head.  A reviewer who encounters that, without sourcing for it, could reasonably choose at their discretion either to double-check it and let it stand, or to remove it as unsourced, being cautious (I would be surprised if any reviewer considered it consequential enough in itself to justify a not-ready, though I could imagine mentioning it in review comments while not-ready'ing for something else).  However, as a reporter you really should be trying to provide documentation for stuff like that &mdash; because review is a miserably complicated tedious affair as it is, and anything that can reasonably be done to make it easier ought to be done.  (Sometimes such things may be occasion for leaving notes for the reviewer on the article talk page when writing an article, to help them know when they oughtn't strain themselves looking for something straightforward in a place where it isn't to be found.)  --Pi zero (talk) 14:29, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Abbreviation style
The past few years we've been allowing the style without periods, "US" etc., as an acceptable alternative to the older traditional style "U.S." etc. The style without periods does have the advantage of being less visually cluttered. Nowadays either style is surely acceptable, though we ought to be consistent within a given article. I get that this sort of picky detail can get under people's skin, but I would point out that it's not very important. (I also point out that there is no such thing as "US style" or "UK style"; the continuum of possible styles is absolutely not partitioned that way.) --Pi zero (talk) 13:28, 11 October 2017 (UTC)