User talk:Gary

Getting started
-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 18:17, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

My goodness...........
.....you've been the busy little beaver. Essentially, cant exactly see that you've done anything inappropriate or unwarranted (other than fiddling a bit with stale articles, but not a huge felony there). You've certainly dove in head-long into story prep, that's for sure. I've noticed an odd thing here, though: often those who dive in super hot-n-heavy in the first week can't be found for dust a month later. Pace yourself, friend! ....and, welcome by-the-by! --Bddpaux (talk) 02:22, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * However, prepared obits are only useful if well-sourced and in-depth. A "he's dead, died of X on Y" is something anyone can knock together in 5-10 minutes.
 * From past experience, that's more likely to happen than a prepped obit with no sources and little-to-no content being built upon. --Brian McNeil / talk 15:51, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

A note on article categories
Fwiw, a few of our categories have quirks about them.

Category:Politicians is an internal category, i.e., it shouldn't be added to articles. (It's for classifying other categories.)

Category:Obituaries is for articles that also contain biographical info about the deceased (there's a usage note on the category page). --Pi zero (talk) 18:22, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

The Assange Factor
I note you've made a lot of edits to the draft on that. But, there's next-to-nothing content-wise in it.

Virtually all you need to know is in, or linked to, from the Howdytemplate above. But, unless you're citing independent sources, and writing more than three paragraphs in active voice using an Inverse pyramid style, no amount of edits will get something published.

This ain't Wikipedia, we don't throw crap out there and let it ferment. No matter how many subject-appropriate categories you put something in.

We only published fully-fledged, fully formed, and grammatically correct news articles. We can help with the latter, but we won't write articles on-demand. --Brian McNeil / talk 18:42, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Your article
An article you wrote, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm dies at 95, looks interesting, but it is too old to be news. I tried to edit it so it's not abandoned anymore, but I couldn't find any recent news articles that would come up with new details of the event within last couple of days.

I would suggest moving a news article to the review queue as soon as possible once you've finished editing it: the developing tag does not bring as much attention and makes an article easier for others to abandon.

On a side-note, the list of references/sources was huge; you would normally only leave the sources that are actually used in the article and would be necessary for fact-checking, rather than collecting everything that looks related and/or interesting.

Thanks for bringing in the important event here in Wikinews, I appreciate it.

Good luck with your future articles, --Gryllida 13:21, 7 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Just a clarification regarding unused sources. A reviewer has to read all the sources, so extra sources can make for much more work for the reviewer.  We therefore have it written into policy that unused sources are not allowed.  The point of making that policy is to protect reviewers, by bolstering their authority should they choose to object to excess sources.  WN:CITE.  --Pi zero (talk) 14:00, 7 October 2012 (UTC)