Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2013/January

What's all the Huff about??
I'm not at all trying to be funny or even sarcastic here.........I don't exactly know how to take Huffington Post. Is it legit? Is it credible? What's its history? Who owns it? What have its critics/supporters had to say about it? Anyone here want to share their thoughts?? --Bddpaux (talk) 20:14, 10 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Huffington Post --Pi zero (talk) 20:35, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

It is legit, but the level of credible is struggling. I think the critics of it have highlighted the "anyone can contribute" nature of it as making it nobetter than Wikipedia. High praise in my book, but I may be biased. It does have staff, it does have an agenda, and it appears to be balanced. Do other news sources use it - generally no, except for odd spots. Is it more left than right? I tend to say left, but there are always subjective issues where a right winger opinion gets mentioned. Not as subversive as the Australian 'Crikey'

Jacketed (talk) 03:55, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

There's some news in there, but there's a lot of bullshit too, including columns from people like Deepak Chopra and homeopaths and anti-vaccine nutters and so on. It's not a source I'd rely on for anything of significance. —Tom Morris (talk) 23:24, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I know, I know, I know........
I'm being a little bit snitty here....but: we don't have a category for "Droughts" but we have one for "New York Fashion Week".......wow. --Bddpaux (talk) 18:51, 12 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Creating needed categories used to feel, to me, kind of hopeless, because even if we had the category, articles would be routinely created with links going to Wikipedia instead of to our local pages (even accidentally by people who know and respect our policy of using local targets when available), and one would have to go repeatedly through every Wikipedia link on every article in the archives (figure that's more than a hundred thousand links, distributed over more than eighteen thousand articles) looking for ones that now have a local target even though the local page might not have existed when the article was written. Part of the purpose of w is to make cat-creation less hopeless, and it does, and in the past two years since we've had that template I've created lots of needed categories; but it still takes labor to create and populate cats, and there are far more needed but not created than the number I've created in a mere two years.


 * If I had a moment to create a category right now (but any time I scrape up now needs to be devoted to review, as we've got things going stale on the queue), I'd probably go for "Massachusetts Institute of Technology", which would go in recently-created internal parent Category:Universities. --Pi zero (talk) 19:15, 12 January 2013 (UTC)