Wikinews:History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia

A key participation requirement of Wikipedians to the Games is successfully getting at least one article about Paralympic sport in Australia published here, on Wikinews. This project page is intended as a 'primer', providing a general overview for those not familiar with the Wikinews project(s).

Writing, and –hopefully– getting an article published
Wikinews is like no other Wikimedia project; if you are more familiar with Wikipedia, you should certainly take the time to look at local policies and guidelines. We also recommend taking a look at a few articles currently listed on the Main page, and make sure you understand what differentiates news from the encyclopaedic!

Here are some of the policies to put you on the right track:


 * Writing an article
 * Original reporting
 * Content guide
 * Neutral point of view
 * Style guide

If that volume of verbiage is a culture shock to you as a Wikipedian, you should probably look at "Wikinews for Wikipedians"; local project denizens can introduce you to the correct source citation method, and &mdash; to a limited extent &mdash; knock your submissions into the correct Inverted pyramid format, but writing about what is new &mdash; in the now &mdash; will vastly improve your chances when it comes to getting a submitted article past peer review.

As you may-well need to refer to them, the criteria your article submissions must meet to pass review are: OR follows original reporting guidelines with notes posted to the article talk page (or otherwise e-mailed/communicated to relevant Wikinews reviewers (For fact-checking and verification of article contents)
 * 1) Agrees with our content guide and is newsworthy
 * 2) Text and images used are not copyright infringements
 * 3) * Images have proper copyright information and source information on their image description pages
 * 4) Text is fully sourced, using multiple independent sources;
 * 1) Content is framed in a neutral and unbiased manner, with no editorial commentary, advocacy or unsourced opinion
 * 2) Largely complies with our style guide: complying on dateline, grammar, spelling and the "inverted pyramid" structure


 * Tone, in-article links, categories and headline conventions are points a good reviewer can fix; but, please strive to quickly learn from changes made prior to publication of any article following review submission.

Becoming an accredited reporter
You need not write articles about Australian sport, or even sport in general, to build the required contribution history to apply for project accreditation. However, if you are seeking accreditation to aid in an application to cover the paralympic games, some sports-related coverage will be most useful in demonstrating you are capable of undertaking the work required at the 2012 Paralympic Games.

The project's accreditation is very valuable for any real-world journalistic work, and may well open doors to a wide variety of other sporting events; having this credential will help bolster your own credentials. It is highly suggested that you become an accredited reporter before going to London.

The accreditation policy can be found at Accreditation policy. The important parts of the policy include you:
 * 1) Being an established, and published, Wikinews contributor. (Or a contributor to another Wikimedia Foundation project who is in good standing there &mdash; GA/FA contributor on ''Wikipedia, for example).
 * 2) Having started, and substantially contributed to, several Wikinews articles; or, a corpus of quality contributions elsewhere on Wikimedia Foundation projects.
 * 3) Demonstrable commitment to NPOV, as shown by contributions and the text of the application.
 * This is particularly important for original reporting – the implicit goal of accreditation.

Once you feel you meet these criteria and have published a few articles, you may want to consider requesting accreditation.

Existing articles
The following are published Paralympic and disability sport related articles that may be used as models for writing your own articles. Many of these are old and may not meet current standards:

Below are some recently published articles about sport in general that may be helpful to model your own articles after:

And, here are some recent exceptionally good articles containing original reporting:

Australian Paralympic news stories
This section will include links to articles submitted by participants as the incentive program gets under way. If you have successfully published an article, you may include here.
 * Paralympic swim world records tumble at Australian championships