Wikinews talk:Category Portals/Local

This would be covered under Eloquence's Portal proposal. Looks like a great idea! -- NGerda 15:33, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

I think that this proposal looks very good, and succinctly explains what we've been talking about for quite a long time. A few suggestions:
 * countries would be Category:CountryName
 * first-level country subdivisions (states, provinces) would be Category:State
 * cities or second-level subdivisions would be Category:City, State
 * sub-cities would be Category:Neighborhood name, City, State (i.e. Category:Belmont Heights, Long Beach, California

This model would allow the categorization to not overlap much between similar cities or neighborhoods around the world. Hopefully names of states won't overlap much, but we'll deal with conflicting state names when we get there.

I think that another part of the proposal needs to be that existing Wikinews editors and administrators need to keep out of neighborhoods, to some degree. They can help with organization of things, and enforce things like copyrights, but the neighborhoods would be responsible for their own NPOV and Not-News monitoring. Wikinews administrators could communicate problems with NPOV etc to some neighborhood reps.

So basically, a very-local story wouldn't give a Wikinews editor rights to dispute its newsworthiness or coverage angle, unless it was of wide (national, or international) importance. This will encourage some degree of autonomy for a community, and give the overall Wikinews the ability to grow these sub-communities organically. -- IlyaHaykinson 19:24, July 15, 2005 (UTC)


 * Ilya - I see where you are going on trying to keep existing wikinews users a bit seperated... but for instance, what about those that want to get invovled in a specific neighborhood - I'm a Quaker, the example Clare has done is perfect for me... thereby, what? should I stay away cause I'm an admin and longtime contributer/lurker (depending on the month), to the site? Lyellin 16:16, 20 July 2005 (UTC)


 * No, no. I just didn't want the "international side" admins jumping in and reworking all sorts of neighborhood stories just because they know better: it's necessary to let communities develop on their own. If you fit into a particular community then by all means, please do participate! -- IlyaHaykinson 17:52, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
 * I assume this separation doesn't apply to NPOV editing, grammar/spelling issues and vanilla style issues such as categorization, interwiki linking (and overlinking) and correcting (mis-)use of wiki code. -- Davodd | Talk 03:44, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I would say that this separation does apply to NPOV editing (i.e. we should give the local community time to resolve NPOV issues... if it's biased, unlist it from prominent portal pages and slap a "friendly npov" tag on it). Same applies to technical problems, unless they prevent the article from appearing correctly. We should only really try to fix things that affect the operations of Wikinews as a whole, and instead try to instruct the community members to fix the problem themselves. This will encourage community growth, imho. -- IlyaHaykinson 06:16, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

I've added a new category and template for community stories and added the following suggested policy to the Quaker's workspace:
 * Sometimes you will be reporting an event that you were personally involved with, that has no sources other than what you write. If this is the case, add the tag to your story.

ClareWhite 14:05, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Category:local
Thought this discussion was more relevan to this page than mine, so am copying it below ClareWhite 15:17, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Category:Local only / Category:Local
Hi Clare!

I understand your reasoning for wishing to avoid cluttering the main page with articles written for the Quaker portal. However, you might want to consider a few other elements:


 * There should not be both a Local and a Local only category; they are redundant.
 * If the local category is blocked from developing on the main page, local articles will have an extremely limited pool of editors/contributors.
 * Wikinews does not allow websquatting - the creation of a de facto personal website.

The reason I removed the Local only from the Developing stories was due to a couple of local stories being written about specific neighborhoods in California. These articles should be in a local category, yet be visible on the main page.

Although I'm supportive of the Quakers portal, I would like to point out that articles listed there appear to be non-standard to the Styleguide, specifically by including a top menu which suggests the articles are not a part of the regular wikinews. Wikinews does not have a policy regarding projects, but on Wikipedia projects generally include a small template at the bottom of the article stating it is a part of a project and a single link to that project. I could easily see such a template, focusing on a single portal which includes the links to workspaces and other portal-specific pages, but I'm not so sure I would approve of the top menu. I'd be happy to work with you to create such a template.

- Amgine/talk 06:51, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi Amgine, thanks for the offer.

The Quakers page is in no way whatsoever supposed to be or appear to be a stand-alone/squatter site as far as I'm concerned, it is meant to be an integral part of Wikinews, with stories of international interest or particular quality being 'promoted'. However, in discussion on the project page there were opinion expressed that portals like that should have a certain freedom to police their own style and that community writing may not, by its nature, have as many sources as a rewrite story. This especially applies if a story is written about someone's own activities which probably wouldn't have anyone else written about them. In my opinion, and others seem to agree, these micro-local stories should be encouraged.

The main reasoning behind having a local only category is because of what you said, you might have a limited pool of contributors but you might also have a very enthusiastic band of writers at another time. This would have a distorting effect on the front page with hundreds of specialist stories suddenly appearing, say if a small group decided to have a Wikinews workshop day. I think this should be encouraged without irritating the 'main' community.

It looks a bit different from the 'bigger' portals mainly because the sectioning of them wouldn't work with such a tiny category, but if you want to have a crack at improving it, feel free. The only comparable portal is a locality based one (Brampton) and so that looks better with the standard formatting.

The portal was fairly clearly marked as a pilot project but I took that off because it seemed fairly well established and there hadn't been any objections to it. It is still marked as being connected to the local proposal but I can make that more prominent.

Category:local only, as far as I know, came first :) I think it's fairer to have that as a category that specifically takes it off the front page as a story is inherently local to whatever category it is in and therefore doesn't need that extra. It wouldn't bother me if it changed, but I would appreciate discussion of it mainly so that I can prepare the Quaker stories and publish them if necessary, at the moment they live in a SpecialPublish status which was done openly and didn't face any opposition at the time.

I'll copy this discussion to the Local project page where you can see more background. Probably makes sense for us to carry on there! ClareWhite 15:13, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * That page and discussion are here ClareWhite 15:17, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I think I may have been unclear. To me the Quaker Portal looks great! (it could be jazzed up, of course, but it's fine the way it is.) To me the articles which are being listed on that page do not look appropriate; they should not have "special" menus. Remember that the Quaker articles *will* appear in other portals and listings - there's no way to limit them only to one venue - so they need to follow the WN:SG first, and other styleguides may add additional but not competitive elements. In other words, if the WN:SG says to do something one way, the Quaker Styleguide cannot contadict or contravene it because the QU:SG is a sub-styleguide.


 * Actually, the elements you list in the Quaker Workspace are excellent additions for the WN:SG, at least the ones which I read.


 * Here's an example of a possible template to indicate an article came from a template (the image is merely a placeholder logo):

Quaker 
 * As for the use of Category:Local_only; I would rather not have articles discriminated against as the default. Perhaps, instead of either, we should use a Category:Publish_local to publish an article locally, and Category:Publish to publish globally? This would allow local articles to be listed in the developing template until published, and would appear on the main page only if published globally. Once local portals start to produce enough articles to begin causing an issue on the main page development (which they do not, now, even if they were to have a massive glut from a workshop) we could implement notcategory=local, but in the meantime it is yet another thing new contributors must do and it insulates a portal from being edited by the full Wikinews community.


 * - Amgine/talk 20:53, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

That sounds fair. There is no reason why developing local stories shouldn't appear on the main page, I agree with the idea of Local_publish to keep them off the developing stories on the main, it sounds like a good evolution. Shall we change Local only to Local_publish then on the notcats? Don't do it yet, I'll rejig the articles in that category and let others know too ClareWhite 11:01, 14 September 2005 (UTC)


 *  Sounds excellent to me. - Amgine/talk 18:52, 14 September 2005 (UTC)