Wikinews:Water cooler/assistance/archives/2019/January

Obits page...
This needs cleaning up I feel, Story preparation/Obituaries, given that Wikinews doesn't seem to keep pre-prepared obits on file at present. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:37, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Category created, please populate
Category:116th_United_States_Congress:
 * Nancy Pelosi again elected Speaker as 116th U.S. Congress sworn in
 * President Trump says he 'can' and 'may' put US into state of emergency to build border wall

Possibly:
 * United States Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announces retirement, since it directly impacted the upcoming Congress.

I realize this is only two articles but we will probably have a few more to populate all Congressional activity over the next two yeas.

Note that I also created a cross-namespace redirect for incoming links from sister projects. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:37, 26 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I have doubts about the advisability of this category. We've never broken down US Congress articles this way before, and populating subcategories of this sort would be inherently error-prone. --Pi zero (talk) 01:42, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Sorry but this is a recurring problem: can you please explain your thinking here? How or why would categorizing by legislative session would be "inherently error-prone"? It's not an inherent problem at or  or . —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:39, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Those other projects have fundamentally different dynamics from en.wn. We get typically about two people (writer/reviewer, in asymmetric roles but pursuing the same goals) creating an article in a very short time (two or three days at most) and in the long term only allow modest curation. The curation does add up over time, but the dynamics of who looks at what and how often are completely different.  With our current set of tools, what reliably works is to leverage w to suggest categories.  We wikilink keywords in each article using w, which uses mainspace targets when available, otherwise links to the target on en.wp (or another sister project).  All local links by w are flagged for attention, to be considered for possible categorization of the article.  A category that gets populated consistently has natural mainspace redirects that are pretty certain to be exercised by wikilinks in any article that should be put in the category.  You can't get fancy with that, and expect it to work right.  Noting, it's often really hard for us to find anything unless it's solidly categorized, because string searches pick up article titles in the infoboxen; and everyone here pours most of their effort into production of new articles, with a relentless need to reduce administrative overheads. --Pi zero (talk) 03:56, 26 January 2019 (UTC)