Wikinews:Contributor Recruitment

Welcome to Wikinews, the Free news source you can write.

Introduction
If you did not already know, Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and a sibling of the well-known Wikipedia project. Just like Wikipedia, anyone with Internet access can contribute to Wikinews. In fact, many of Wikinews' regular contributors will tell you it is easier to work on this project than on Wikipedia.

The bread-and-butter of Wikinews content is the synthesis article; this is a news article written from several independent sources, in your own words, and complying with the WMF-wide Neutral Point Of View policy. Anyone can do this, just pick the latest piece of news that caught your eye, check it is not already covered, find another source or two to read, and create an article in your own words. This is recommended as a way of starting your involvement with the project; one of the people who watches recent changes should spot your contributions and you will get the hello template on your user page. This links to the key policies you should spend some time getting to know. None of the regular contributors will expect you to read all the linked to essays, articles, and policies but, please do check out citing sources, and if you do not have experience on another WMF project, the neutral point of view policy. If your contributions stick to these then you can likely put the publish template at the bottom of your article once you have written up two or three paragraphs. This puts it on the Main Page, everybody looking at Wikinews will see it; congratulations! You are now a citizen journalist.

In stark contrast to Wikipedia, Wikinews allows original research, this can be quite a complicated issue so it is given its own section later in this document. In summary, if you are covering a news story you can email or phone involved parties for quotes and comments and include them in your article; the template Original is used to indicate this and you must detail what research you did on the articles talk/collaboration page.

That is really all you need to get started, there is a form on the Main Page to start an article - or the one in the following section, as is said on most WMF projects, Be Bold!.

Get started!
 Anyone, including you, can write for Wikinews! Just type a title in the box below, click "Create article", and start writing:

Contributor retention
A problem with most wiki projects is retaining contributors and getting them involved in some of the other aspects of keeping a project running. With Wikinews being a fast-paced project, sometimes things get tagged or unpublished and the original contributor may not understand why. So, for established contributors, share the knowledge you have learned working on the project; try to avoid tag-and-dash, put more detail than the tags permit on the article talk page, or user talk page, and if a new contributor ignores/removes tags warn them about the three revert rule before they get close to it. If you are also an administrator, remember the guidelines for WN:3RR violation specify blocks of up to 24 hours for a first offence - not an automatic 24 hours block.

If you are a new contributor and your first article has been tagged for cleanup or something like that and you do not understand why, then take it up with the person who tagged it. If this is not immediately apparent then click on the "history" tab at the top of the web page. If the provided list does not make it clear who objected, then fall back to asking for help on the article's talk page (this is labelled "collaboration").