Wikinews:Writing a Photo essay

While Wikinews features a variety of content, the project's mainstay is the classic news article. However, wiki tools are ideally suited to constructing an article with the primary focus on photographs instead of text. This short essay is intended to guide people through the process of creating such an article. There is considerably less need to be intimately familiar with the style guide. Perhaps most critically, it is no longer required to write out the three paragraphs usually viewed as the minimum for an article, although you must still explain the context in which the photographs were taken as readers are not expected to know, regardless of how 'big' the event might be.

Key points from the more generalised essay on article construction still apply, namely:
 * Articles must be timely. They are never backdated to match an event, and the event they cover should be within the last few days.
 * Articles go through three stages, develop while the piece is constructed and formatted; review when the article is, in your opinion, good enough to be published; lastly, publish when the article has been checked by a contributor who the community has granted review privileges to and passed.
 * The neutral point of view policy is non-negotiable.

Examples
Before starting, it might be helpful to look at some already published photoessays on wikinews (keeping in mind, older articles may not meet current review standards, including image copyright policy):
 * There are currently articles in Category:Photo essays.

 category=Published category=Photo essays notcategory=No publish suppresserrors=true ordermethod=categoryadd addfirstcategorydate=true addcategorydatefirst=true  ( [ Refresh] )

Headline
All articles need a title. For detailed instructions on how to choose a title, see the style guide, but in general there are a couple of key points to remember:
 * Titles should be downstyle, which means that only proper nouns should be capitalised. Example: Fanime convention winds down in San Jose, California is correct, but Fanime Convention Winds Down in San Jose, California is not acceptable per the style guide.
 * Use the present tense. Fanime convention winds down in San Jose, California not Fanime convention wound down in San Jose, California
 * Write the most important, or unique thing about the article in question
 * Try to use the active voice. Leader goes to shop is much better than Shop visited by leader.

Remember, titles can be changed. If you have a problem renaming an article you are working on, leave a note on the talk page with the flag or editprotected templates to call in help. Do explain what your preferred title is.

Lede
All articles start with a date template. This date reflects when the article is published (which may or may not be when the event took place). Generally: The second form will automatically get turned into the first form when you save the page.

In most normal articles an infobox is used. These can interfere with the presentation of a photoessay, best to avoid.

You should write your introduction as soon as possible. Since you are writing a photoessay, this need not be the length of a normal article. However, you still must address the 5W and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How) of your story. The introduction should also give context to the photos in your article &mdash; for an international audience. Its important that the audience know what the photos are about, and why the photographs are important or noteworthy. The introduction should also tell the reader what news event the essay is focused on. Remember that a photoessay is not just a random gallery of photos; it is also a news article, which must be reporting some specific event.

Uploading
One of the goals of Wikinews, is to allow information to be dispersed, reused, modified, &c. (See the Wikipedia article on the Free Culture Movement for more information on the philosophical underpinnings). To this end, if you contribute to Wikinews, you must allow anyone to copy and modify your photos in their own derivative works. We use the website Wikimedia Commons to host our photos. As long as you have a unified account (See Special:MergeAccount to get one), your Wikinews login should work at Commons too (As well as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and several other sites).

To upload an image at commons visit Commons:Upload and follow the instructions. Please make sure to give your images descriptive names (Dog_at_the_park_in_london_england.jpg is much more useful than picture012312142.jpg) and that you upload the highest resolution possible. If you are unsure if you did this correctly, feel free to ask a Wikinewsie in the chatroom (IRC).

Once your file is uploaded, you should be able to use it anywhere on Wikinews (and in several other places)

Note: if you wish to upload fair use/dealing images (which should not be used in photoessays) see Fair use.

Adding to your article

 * See also mw:help:Images

Normal images
All of these examples will use File:example.jpg. It should also be noted that you can prefix your images with Image: (Image:Example.jpg and File:example.jpg are equivalent).

The easiest way to add an image to your article is as follows Which places the image on the right:

The first part  specifies the image name. Then comes, which specifies it should have a caption. Next is, meaning it should be on the right of the screen (As opposed to say the left side, or centered). Then comes the size. means that the image will be resized to be 300 pixels wide. Last is the caption. It can contain links, bold text, etc using normal wiki markup. If the image comes from elsewhere, credit to the original author should be added to this caption (if you are the original author, such credit is optional). Credit lines are added as follows (see image on left):



Galleries
Galleries are a way to display several images. Example:

image chooser (Picture select)
This is a method to display the images one at a time. For example

makes:

The overall width parameter is the width of the whole box. This should be a little bit bigger than the image width, or the border will be crunched. This template can support a large number of images. In addition the tabs can change from being numbers to being any arbitrary text. For a complex example see the page source of Picture_of_the_Year_2008/round_1. For more information on this template, see its documentation.

Ticker slideshow
I'm adding this for completeness, but you probably should not use this on your article unless you're really sure its a good idea.

It's possible to create a picture slideshow on your article. For example:

Creates:

specifies no transition (other choice is fade). specifies 1.5x speed (you'd probably want it much slower on an article). Note it's somewhat disorienting if the images change height. To work arround this, either make all the images the same height, or wrap each image in a div that has a specific height set. For example (using the fade transition):

makes:

Which, as you'll notice, does not bounce arround the text below it. It should be noted the fade transition is not as well tested. See ticker for more information.