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

Brevity

 * Elephants! So darned hard organising a cocktail party around these beasts!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a trait shared by most Wikinewsies is valuing brevity. The ideal style for writing news is to provide the highest signal-to-noise ratio possible; less 'fluff', more facts.

This aesthetic naturally spills over into namespaces for discussion, where a 'Wikipedian' desire to "educate from kindergarten level" impedes news production and, generally, makes otherwise-intelligent people who 'get' the Wikinewsie outlook want to break something.

This is, as-best I can currently express, the reasoning behind creating this essay. There is a need to find, and catalogue, ways of saying "Stop, this does not work" in response to 'Wikipedian' debating styles which lead nowhere; such assumes the encyclopedic lack of time constraints to produce the ideal article. News will never have that, and I'm getting tired of trying to explain this. --Brian McNeil / talk 22:10, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I fully concur. I noted a tidbit from Strunk on that page. I think, if one will review a later version, the dictum is (technically speaking), "Omit needless words." My God, I love that sentence. --Bddpaux (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Crat nom
Although announced at the sitenotice, perhaps there should be a notice at the cooler as well. We don't, after all, have crat nominations terribly often on en.wn.
 * Pi zero has been nominated for use of the Bureaucrat tools. Please provide your input.

(Okay, I feel a little silly posting this notice myself, but, meh.) --Pi zero (talk) 17:53, 10 January 2013 (UTC)