Talk:Public services shutting down in New South Wales, Australia due to lack of money

Can anyone else flesh this story out with more examples of public services using Christmas/New Year as a cover, and closing for longer periods than are necessary?

I noticed that my line "Disclosure: John Dalton, a contributor to this article, is currently a postgraduate student at the University of Newcastle." was deleted. This was not meant to be a "by-line" trying give myself credit. It was meant to be a way of warning readers that I am in some way associated with an institution being discussed in the article so they could be on their guard against bias.

How are we to guard against such bias? I have made every effort to be unbiased and base what I say on third party sources rather than my opinions. Despite this, I think readers need to know of my association. Is a line "Disclosure: A contributor to this article, is currently a postgraduate student at the University of Newcastle." acceptable?

One solution might be to refrain from writing articles about any institution which which I am associated. I think that is over the top and eliminates important sources of information from Wikipedia. There are two ways to look at a Wikinews contributor:

• As a reporter, in which case it is questionable whether I should be writing about the University of Newcastle.

• As a source providing information to a reporter, in which case it is acceptable for me to write about the University of Newcastle. In this case the 'reporter' is all the other people on Wiknews, who are free to edit the information I provide.

I lean towards the second scenario, as a crucial difference between wikinews and a newspaper is that bias due to an association can be instantly removed by a third party.

What do others think?

We are all biased - some people hate George Bush, some people hate leftie pinko protestors, some people think global warming is a load of rubbish, some people work/study at the University of Newcastle. It is up to yourself and the community to try to eliminate the effects of that bias in articles, or rather, present all biases equally. In the case of original reporting, it is always going to be the case that the person doing the reporting is in some way involved in the events being reported. This is certainly true with all of the Sydney protests that we have reported - the contributors are almost universally participants in the protests. If you have done original reporting for this article, then you should add an "Original reporting" section to this talk page, explaining what you did and what information in the article came from you as the source. Remember, this article wasn't written by you, it was written by the Wikinews community. Very few may have actively changed it, but many have read it, and decided to not change it. However, if you still feel that you need to declare your bias, feel free to do it here on the talk page. - Borofkin 02:45, 19 December 2005 (UTC)