Wikinews:Editorial reviewing

In order to try and ensure that all news made available via Wikinews is as accurate as possible, a number of technical and social measures are applied.

Restrictions on the front page and material presented to casual readers
Content displayed on Wikinews' front page must first be viewed and approved by an administrator or other established and trusted contributor. This is not generally a feature found in the MediaWiki wiki software, but is use of an extension to the package developed to allow the German language Wikipedia to implement a quality control procedure. The extension is called Flagged revisions and, through selecting only revisions which have been subject to a review, the content displayed on the front page is limited.

This restriction to reviewed content is also automatically applied where the reader is not a registered and logged in Wikinews user. Thus, for casual readers who may be directed to the site from a news portal, the risk of encountering vandalism or other abusive content is minimised. Such "casual readers" also include software agents (or robots) which may automatically read the site's content for presentation in an index of recent news articles.

The review process
To ensure that reviewing is meaningful the above approval process is - as mentioned - restricted. Technical measures cannot ensure that people behave in an ethical manner, so the process of deciding who may mark an article as ready for the front page is decided by Wikinews' established community of regular contributors. This is complemented by certain basic guidelines for those who may approve articles, such as requiring an article to have been fact-checked against the used sources or the author quizzed over their original reporting work. The most obvious measure here is that no article author may review and approve their own work; each article must go through a review by an independent contributor. This should be documented on the article's collaboration page using the peer review template. This review may include minor copyedit, spelling corrections, and categorisation of the article, but any substantial contribution disqualifies contributors from carrying out the review. Breach of this "Wikinews etiquette" is grounds for removal of the privilege to approve articles for use on the main page. In the case of such action being taken by a previously elected site administrator this will also involve removal of their administrative privileges.