Talk:Around 7,100 cheetahs remain, say experts

Review of revision 4273592 [Not ready]

Revision 4273592 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 13:22, 27 December 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Not ready: Needs a clear focus; see below. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: See below. Comments by reviewer: Build a news article around a focal event: something specific that just happened in the past day or two. The headline should tell the most important and unique thing about the focus; but here, the headline describes an alleged state of things rather than an event (a state of things is determined by assessment/analysis, which is against our neutrality policy). The lede should briefly summarize the focal event by succinctly answering as many as reasonably possible of the five Ws and an H about it. Here the lede is, again, describing a general state of things as assessed/analyzed. The body of the article as a whole should following broadly an inverted pyramid style. Are all of those eight sources used? Keeping in mind, the Sources section is a list of articles that were used for the article, not a list of recommended reading See WN:PILLARS, WN:WRITE. Questions about the above? Ask. If possible, please address the above issues then resubmit the article for another review (by replacing {{tasks}} in the article with {{review}}). This talk page will be updated with subsequent reviews.

Revision 4273592 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 13:22, 27 December 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Not ready: Needs a clear focus; see below. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: See below. Comments by reviewer: Build a news article around a focal event: something specific that just happened in the past day or two. The headline should tell the most important and unique thing about the focus; but here, the headline describes an alleged state of things rather than an event (a state of things is determined by assessment/analysis, which is against our neutrality policy). The lede should briefly summarize the focal event by succinctly answering as many as reasonably possible of the five Ws and an H about it. Here the lede is, again, describing a general state of things as assessed/analyzed. The body of the article as a whole should following broadly an inverted pyramid style. Are all of those eight sources used? Keeping in mind, the Sources section is a list of articles that were used for the article, not a list of recommended reading See WN:PILLARS, WN:WRITE. Questions about the above? Ask. If possible, please address the above issues then resubmit the article for another review (by replacing {{tasks}} in the article with {{review}}). This talk page will be updated with subsequent reviews.

Did a lot of cleanup

I changed the lede and the body. I also wrote a lot more content than I did before submission. I eliminated ITV and Sky as redundant, but the remaining sources say what the article says. Any more needs? --George Ho (talk) 20:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I changed the lede to point out that the thing that happened just now was the release of the study showing this finding. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:24, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Eurekalert, Phys.org and PNAS

I compared Eurekalert, Phys.org, and PNAS. PNAS is... not accessible to me; subscription is required. Eurekalert is accessible and makes attribution. Phys.org... might not attribute but says that Zoological Society of London provided the content. Darkfrog24, can you explain? --George Ho (talk) 05:47, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

PNAS do have an extract, which is accessible; it may be the elements using that source come from there. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 12:00, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

I've pulled out of reviewing for now, partly because lunch is imminent. I'm concerned, though, that a string search for "less than fifty" doesn't turn up in any sources. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 13:33, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Here are DW, Associated Press, and BBC. They say fewer than 50 cheetahs remain in Asia. --George Ho (talk) 13:39, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

But none contain the string "less than fifty", which appears in a direct quote in the version I was checking. A big concern, because it was ascribed to the study, and the study in turn is paywalled except for the abstract. If facts have been pulled from the bit behind the paywall we could have real problems. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:51, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure what we're talking about here. I removed the source listing for Eurekalert because I checked and it's the same article as the one at Phys.org. I don't much care which one we keep but we don't need both.

I'm inferring that some kind of issue with a direct quote. The DW article reads, verbatim: "Apart from the less than 50 remaining in Iran, cheetahs have been virtually wiped out in Asia." Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:02, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

The version I looked at contained the quote "less than fifty remaining in Iran", which was ascribed to the study in PNAS. It's since changed in three ways; fifty->50, remaining->remain[ing], and it's no longer ascribed to the study but to one of the secondary sources. Had I the time (it ran out on me) to finish the review I'd have found exactly what all the sources had to say on the issue; not having the time, and aware we had a paywalled source and a quote ascribed to it that wasn't sourced, I raised the issue. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 19:10, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

I... somewhat misattributed, so I cleaned up the error and attributed to another source instead. --George Ho (talk) 19:19, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

<nods> A small and easily fixed error, in the end. Incidentally, the paper nominates a particular author to receive correspondence. We could always shoot for an interview. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 19:24, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Meanwhile, will you continue editing the page then? --George Ho (talk) 20:07, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

I hope to, but it may be a few hours. Can't promise. If I absolutely can't tonight (and nobody else does either) I can promise it for tomorrow. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 21:37, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

A lot of names or "et al"?

Also, adding back a clutter list of names... I don't know. Would this befuddle readers? --George Ho (talk) 05:48, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

If a reader can understand what "et al" means, they can understand the list. Et al is most useful for inline citations e.g. in academic works. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 10:21, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

How about "and others" instead, Blood Red Sandman? Would that work? --George Ho (talk) 11:53, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

No. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 11:57, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Did other articles have multiple authors in one source? --George Ho (talk) 12:03, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

From time to time, especially when citing scientific research. Study confirms efficacy of NewLink Genetics ebola vaccine went out the other day. Reuters can produce lengthy author lists as well. I don't understand why there is, out of the blue, a sudden push to stop listing them. They're either authors or they aren't. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 12:08, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

I apologize. Actually, I had two articles successfully published. This is my third or fourth attempt as I am learning how Wikinews works. Crediting so many authors is new to me, especially when I have written essays and used academic styling in college. I'll relent and allow listing of multiple authors then. --George Ho (talk) 12:13, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

You don't need to apologise. Wikinews has an odd learning curve; very steep, but mercifully short. I've not yet dug into this one, but the obituary was very good. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 12:17, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, no no no. Most of the Michael obituary work goes to Darkfrog24. Thank you though. --George Ho (talk) 12:43, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, they may have written more of it than you, but the article stuck to your structure. I thought it worked quite well. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 13:02, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

This is a collaborative project. Almost every article is a team production. It's nice to be appreciated, though.

As for "et al.," Wikipedia has a "showauthors" function that will fix it so that the first few names are visible to the reader followed by "et al." but the full list is visible in the Wikicode. I like that solution a lot, but Wikinews isn't set up for it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:00, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Review of revision 4274328 [Passed]

Revision 4274328 of this article has been reviewed by Blood Red Sandman (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 17:33, 29 December 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: This was challenging, and rewarding, to review. How do people feel about a collaborative effort to interview the lead author? At the risk, of course, she'll spot any mistakes we've made ;) The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.

Revision 4274328 of this article has been reviewed by Blood Red Sandman (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 17:33, 29 December 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: This was challenging, and rewarding, to review. How do people feel about a collaborative effort to interview the lead author? At the risk, of course, she'll spot any mistakes we've made ;) The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.

Blood Red Sandman, to what "she" were you referring? I'm a "he". --George Ho (talk) 20:39, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure he means lead author Dr. Sarah M. Durant, not any of the authors of this article. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:15, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Indeed I do. :P I mentioned somewhere else on this talk page, correspondence is invited to her in particular. I've done a few science interviews previously, and would be happy to get the ball rolling. It would be wonderful to do some truly collaborative OR, though, with multiple Wikinewsies writing up an intro and deciding questions. Interviewing scientists, who love to talk about their work, is actually a surprisingly easy way to get very cool content, and a news site is an unusual project from a WMF perspective in that it's a place where OR is welcome. If I'm honest, I wish I'd done more science interviews. Like, dozens more. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 21:32, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Well I've never done one before, so I guess it could be a good new experience. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:06, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I'll send a message to her soon, then. :) BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 15:14, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Image licenses

@Agastya Chandrakant, Blood Red Sandman:

This seems like a good moment to raise the issue of why/whether we would want to explicitly list licensing info for images on an article — since, in this case, one of the images was not being given that info and another was released under multiple licenses only one of which was being explicitly mentioned.

It's my understanding that giving credit to the photographer is a courtesy on our part, since making such metadata available is supposed to be a responsibility of the software (or is this about the Foundation's recent abrogation of their responsibility to do that?). The licensing is a complicated/esoteric bit of metadata that I don't recall ever seeing us explicitly list before, causes all the image captions to take up more space, and doesn't seem to be the same sort of 'courtesy' as acknowledging the photographer. So, what is the rationale for cluttering up articles with it? --Pi zero (talk) 13:06, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Iirc it was a courtesy, yes. I've no strong feelings. It's not the clearest, but is linked appropriately; it proudly reminds we endeavour to be free. Against, though, is the silliness of discussing copyright on a 15th century painting, or on having to type out "fair use" for, say, a logo or mugshot. It also adds a small amount of clutter, I suppose. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 14:26, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Thinking further. I seem to have a vague idea we've talked about this before. Don't recall much more; not very helpful, I know. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 15:12, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Adding the license is for the reusers to know if they can reuse that media, and is there any restrictions. Since the servers are located in the US, the commoners care to mention only about the freedom while reusing in the US. Even though the da Vinci art was created five centuries ago, and the author has died more than a 100 years ago, not all countries allow the reuse of public domain in the two dimensional art. We can't assume that the reusers is from the US. And linking to the license seems to be a good idea to avoid any kind of uncertainty.
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 17:49, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm tempted to mass-sight them all for the time being. I've no strong preference (there's pros and cons) but there's nothing presently preventing it in the style guide. They also aren't content edits. If an ultimate decision is not to have them, we can always strip them back out. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 18:12, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Creative Commons Attribution license says, "You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made."
Appropriate credit: If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.

Seems that there is no escape.
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 06:34, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for helping me clarify my thinking on this.

I think you're misinterpreting the application of those words. They describe what must be done when providing legal credit. We are not trying, need not try, and should not try, to provide legal credit here.

• Are not trying: As noted, we are acknowledging the work of others as a courtesy, just as we give other news sources credit for exclusives as a courtesy.
• Need not try: To find the legal credit information you visit the image page (I could go off on a tangent here about why the MediaViewer thing was condemned by some as a flagrant copyright violation by the Foundation on a vast scale). This is why it matters that we provide some acknowledgement merely as a courtesy: it's a courtesy rather than a legal statement.
• Should not try: If we appear to be trying to provide the legal information, we are unnecessarily introducing an additional source of errors: an additional way to get it wrong and mislead people who have a legitimate (in both senses) need for the information. And making the image caption more visually complicated in the process.

After sitting on the fence about this for some time, I'm now leaning toward rejecting these edits. --Pi zero (talk) 13:46, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

Well... My understanding is the Foundation took legal advice (Why wouldn't they? They have it in-house!) to the effect that having this stuff on image description pages was sufficient. That doesn't deflate the previously-expressed arguments in favour, though; 'free and proud', and assisting reusers. Those fit well with our purpose. It doesn't, of course, deflate the arguments against, either. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 14:11, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

(On the tangent: One reason I was leery of that tangent is that I don't entirely understand the argument myself, and wouldn't relish delving into it. Wiki markup provides a way to specify that an image should link somewhere other than the image page, or should not link to anything if clicked, which I always wondered about from a legal perspective. I think perhaps the objection was that the thing you got when clicking on the image with the viewer, at least at the time, systematically hindered readers from getting to the legal info even if they wanted to. Maybe.)

I agree that the advantages you've named to providing the info are not invalidated. However, having satisfied myself on why we are not obligated to provide the information, I do not think we should be creating the appearance of including the legal info when this invites an additional opportunity for us to get things wrong and may also create an expectation of providing info we don't have to provide, pushing us to do additional work we don't have to do. --Pi zero (talk) 14:32, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

Would it be possible to hide it? So, list the licence as a template parameter like licence= which creates... What, exactly? Something that springs open with preset details? I don't know if I support that, and it's my own idea; I'm thinking aloud. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 19:27, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

I'd been wondering that myself. Now that you say it out loud, it occurs to me that clicking on the image, to get to the image page, would be of about the same level of convenience to the reader... I think. I wonder if we could provide something one would click on that would automagically extract the licensing info from the image page. That would be more specific than clicking through to the image page and then having to hunt out the information; would, one supposes, provide some small reminder of the issue on the article page without cluttering it up as much; and would, if done well enough, avoid introducing much work for us and avoid introducing an additional way to get things wrong. --Pi zero (talk) 20:25, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

• Why don't we just add a link direct to the image description page, via {{image credit}}, which reads something like "Reuse terms"? BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 20:31, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll give that idea a bit of time to sink in, but at first hearing, it sounds like it might work well. Emphasizes the issue, minimizes clutter (one would want to give that point some care), avoids redundant specification of technical info, works regardless of the viewer thing. --Pi zero (talk) 20:50, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

With these edits sitting awaiting review for weeks, I still haven't had a better idea. I say we go for it, with the proviso I'm too much of a luddite to edit the template myself. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 14:43, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I've been thinking I'd reject the changes on the expectation of doing something with the template; the only catch is to take precautions the plan to edit the template won't get lost absent the pressure of the pending edits. So maybe I'll take a bit of a look at the template right now. --Pi zero (talk) 14:58, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Hm. There's a logistical problem here. The {{image source}} template isn't the place to do that, because it doesn't know the name of the image file. It would be both tedious and error-prone to have to specify the image twice; so this change wants to be driven by a template that frames the whole thing, file and caption and credit all together (as {{missing image}} does, but now we want something for non-pathological cases). This would seem to require replacing the entire native wiki markup for files [[File:...|...]] with a template call in all cases, which would be quite intrusive and, at first contemplation, doesn't fill me with joy. --Pi zero (talk) 15:17, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

What about an optional file= parameter? Enter the filename, generate a link. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:05, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, on consideration, that does make sense. Even if some overarching device (similar to {{missing image}}) were provided to assure the image and the credit-link remain synched, the overarching device would have to use an optional parameter like that to feed the synched information into {{image source}}. --Pi zero (talk) 16:18, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I've added a file parameter to {{image source}}. It seems to work, technically. --Pi zero (talk) 23:27, 6 February 2017 (UTC)