User talk:Davidruben

Welcome
, welcome to Wikinews! Thank you for your contributions; I hope you like the place and decide to stay! If you haven't done so already, you may want to create an account.

Our key policies - if you read anything, read these! Here a few pointers to help you get to know Wikinews: There are always things to do on Wikinews: By the way, you can sign your name on Talk pages using four tildes ( &#126;&#126;&#126;&#126; ), which produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, you can ask them at the water cooler or to anyone on the Welcommittee, or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! --Brian McNeil / talk 16:37, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Neutral point of view - tell every side to a story in a fair and balanced way
 * Cite sources - everything in a Wikinews article must be sourced
 * Introduction - overview of the site
 * Writing an article - how to write and publish a complete article
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 * Contents - the contents page.
 * Newsroom - The comunity portal
 * Existing articles need expanding and checking for spelling and mistakes
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 * And of course, stories need writing!

I noticed Your message on Brianmc's page and thought I'd answer since he doesn't appear to be around at the moment. (hope you/or him don't mind)
 * - My advice: Don't use it. Generally you don't want to use it unless your making a big change (ie editing for a period ~ over two minutes).
 * Other tags: similiar to wikipedia pretty much, Really only need them if you have a problem with somebody elses article.
 * Article flags - Don't worry too much about pages like that if they confuse you, most of them are a bit outdated (really need to get arround to fixing them)
 * - The only tag you actually need to know. Basicly it makes the story appear on the front page.
 * Getting help. My advice would be to ask on irc. Lots of friendly wikinewsies hang out there. If you have an IRC client try #Wikinews at irc.freenode.net or try the real time chat link at the top of every page for a web version.
 * Wikipedia is a seperate project from wikinews and we have no say about in the news (they ussually don't even use us as a source). see Current events for more information.
 * hope that helped. feel free to ask me or anyone else any questions you may have. Bawolff ☺☻[[image:smile.png]] 03:56, 15 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Good advice there from Bawolff, saves me having to figure it out and give you some answers. What I will point out is that wikinews is currently still a fairly small community.  That means that referring to IRC if you want someone to review your work is a good idea.  As I'm based in Belgium your message was way too late at night for me to be about, I think I'd shut down my machine a couple of hours earlier.  As Bawolff's comment indicates, we could do with polishing up some of our guidelines - there is an assumption that people are coming over from wikipedia with experience when they may not have it.
 * To help you get clued up on where there are discussions on the wiki you might want to check Recent Changes from time to time. As we have a fairly low edits per day count you can pick up most of the areas on the wiki where there is activity.  Just don't get too sucked into policy stuff - you'll need to get to know some of the local characters first as maintaining NPOV on news seems to be more difficult than on wikipedia.
 * Lastly, refer to what wikinews is not, we aren't quite the same as wikipedia so you need to avoid pitfalls like making a news story too encyclopedic. But there's good news there, unlike wikipedia we allow original research.  That means you can do things like go out and interview people or use email to solicit quotes from experts for use in articles. --Brian McNeil / talk 16:45, 15 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the advice, (now if I can just work out why I get logged out of wikinews after 1 minute (I.E. clearing session-cookies apparently) yet no problem with wikipedia's cookies .... nope, so manually create signature...) David Ruben / Talk 22:58, 15 March 2006 (UTC)