Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2017/September

enwp straw poll on current events policy
Wanted to give a heads up that the English Wikipedia (enwp) is discussing how to handle its enthusiastic coverage of new current events. We tend to collect articles on anything that gets a flash of news coverage, which once all reporting is in, guarantees an eventual (mired) discussion as to whether the topic is fit for an encyclopedia. Perhaps there would be a better way to transfer this otherwise useful content for a Wikinews-style report? If some Wikinews regulars could chime in (see discussion section) on how the two projects may work better together—namely how we can transfer the editor interest your way—we could use the input: w:Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)  czar  03:15, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * we have incompatible licence. acagastya PING ME! 03:49, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * If you have never edited Wikinews, you might not be knowing the various stages of a news article. First, it is written. It has a develop tag. Once the author feels the article is ready and an experienced editor should review the article, they add review tag. An experienced editor will check for newsworthiness, verify the article, check if the style is correct, whether it is neutral (Wikipedia and Wikinews’s neutrality differs), confirm if the article is not a blatant copyright violation and after all of these, either the article is published, or the article needs improvements (tasks). A published article will go to archive one day, but if the article could not be published within three days of it happening, it is not “relatively new” to be news. It is stale and will be deleted eventually. Even if we had compatible licenses, the rate at which articles are submitted for review should match the rate at which articles are published. With more and more articles piling up the review queue, is hard to get everything done. Someone commented that Wikinews doesn’t do solid news. (Or something like “most important stories”) it is not like that. First, editors write what they like to cover about. Second, those “important stories lose their freshness real quick, because the main stream media covers it extensively. If you think nobody wrote about Mexico’s earthquake, or Barcelona’s attacks, or Manchester bombing, or these hurricanes — you are wrong. Editors wrote about it. Only: we could not match the rate at which we had articles submitted and the articles published. And as I mentioned, if the article was ever marked stale, it would be deleted. So the only record of an article ever been created is the “articles created” link at the bottom of contributions page of each editor. If the editors at Wikipedia choose to spare some time and write articles, it would be good. But. Sometimes, on Wikinews, we don’t have articles to review, other times, the review queue is crowded with dozens of articles. That doesn’t mean we don’t want people to write news articles. We want them to write good ones, so reviewing them is easy. Pizero is working on improving how to review an article easily and effectively. Their goal is also to make it easier for anyone to write it. But again, blindly importing content would be violation of CC licenses. Anyone who wishes write an article is welcome. acagastya PING ME! 04:17, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks, . I understand that the content from enwp may not fit at all (both for reasons of license and freshness). The enwp discussion is mostly speculative (it's a straw poll) about how enwp should handle articles more fit to be news stories than encyclopedia articles. The answer may be that Wikinews editors aren't interested in adopting that content, but I wanted to reach out in case the answer was that Wikinews would be interested in, say, Wikipedia encouraging editors to instead import and submit through Wikinews rather than as Wikipedia articles. Probably best discussed at the enwp discussion, in any case. czar  04:48, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I did not say we are not interested. What I am saying is it is not possible due to technical reasons. Any editor is welcome here. But they must know the basic idea of how a news article is written. Of course, we are here to help. acagastya PING ME! 05:35, 26 September 2017 (UTC)


 * see comments in the next section on "bottleneck and vision".