Talk:Questions raised over Mosquito device ahead of New South Wales trial

Original reporting notes

I used comments posted at the bottom of a Telegragh article (included as one of my sources) to generate some new questions about the devices including this one: couldn't young vandals just use earplugs or headphones to block out the noise?

Emails, Phone call transcripts, other written evidence

RailCorp emails - sent to scoop@wikinewsie.org

Interview details

Liberal Kiama MP Gareth Ward - audio sent to scoop@wikinewsie.org

NSW Council for Civil Liberties President Cameron Murphy - audio sent to scoop@wikinewsie.org

On-the-spot notes

not applicable

Details from broadcast report

not applicable

Information shared privately for off-wiki confirmation

Details above

Confirmation of email receipt by accredited reporter

not applicable

Review of revision 1932228 [Not ready]

Revision 1932228 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 12:28, 22 June 2013 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: See below. Comments by reviewer: It's very cool to see OR. The presentation needs improvement (in fact, the presentation needs improvement before it makes sense to undertake a full source-check). The lede does not explain what this device is, leaving the reader baffled. In fact, the article leaves this a mystery. When people say things, and they said them exclusively to someone, we give credit to who got the exclusive. That includes exclusives to us. The word "Wikinews" doesn't appear a single time in this article; I can't even tell by looking at the article what, if anything, here is actually from the original reporting. Moreover, because the presence of OR here is key to newsworthiness, I would have thought Wikinews would be mentioned in the lede (since the lede should establish newsworthiness, as mentioned e.g. in WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing). Btw, I also noticed, when briefly checking the materials sent to scoop (to make sure they arrived), that that person asked to be attributed as 'a RailCorp spokesman' — yet I don't see such attribution here of anything. 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 1932228 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 12:28, 22 June 2013 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: See below. Comments by reviewer: It's very cool to see OR. The presentation needs improvement (in fact, the presentation needs improvement before it makes sense to undertake a full source-check). The lede does not explain what this device is, leaving the reader baffled. In fact, the article leaves this a mystery. When people say things, and they said them exclusively to someone, we give credit to who got the exclusive. That includes exclusives to us. The word "Wikinews" doesn't appear a single time in this article; I can't even tell by looking at the article what, if anything, here is actually from the original reporting. Moreover, because the presence of OR here is key to newsworthiness, I would have thought Wikinews would be mentioned in the lede (since the lede should establish newsworthiness, as mentioned e.g. in WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing). Btw, I also noticed, when briefly checking the materials sent to scoop (to make sure they arrived), that that person asked to be attributed as 'a RailCorp spokesman' — yet I don't see such attribution here of anything. 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.

Review of revision 1933179 [Passed]

Revision 1933179 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 18:39, 23 June 2013 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: There were significant neutrality problems. The presentation of the article was itself biased in some ways. Part of this is phrasing that introduces bias (note for example my removal of a couple of "however"s and an "ironically"). Part of it is a liability of "summarizing" what the interviewer said rather than actually reporting what they said. Good interviews are mostly direct quotes; the best ones are generally transcripts. In this case I don't think a transcript would have come out well, because of my second point about bias: The interview itself had neutrality problems. Leading questions. It isn't enough to report about the interview neutrally, the interview itself should be conducted neutrally. Some of the questions seemed to be fishing for a response. This impression was further strengthened by bias in the way responses were summarized: The interviewer would say (I'm exaggerating/simplifying some to illustrate my point) "I've heard it said that X", and when the interviewee responds with something similar to X and doesn't actually object to X, the interviewer reports that the interviewee said X. In one case, I changed a passage to say the interviewee "acknowledged" X; in another, I removed the entire passage, noting the interviewee actually hadn't said X, and what he did say was presented immediately thereafter by a direct quote. The lede still had some problems; I tried to shore it up, but was uncomfortable that on one hand I was pushing the limits of what a reviewer can do without getting too involved to review, and on the other hand I wasn't making as large a change as would ideally be called for. Remember the lede is supposed to identify the focal news event. The original lede had tried to present the expression of new criticisms as the event, although it's not clear to me that any of the criticisms reported on here are actually new as such. But with a full-blown interview, the interview itself is the event. This is the essence of why an interview can stay fresh for many times longer than a synthesis article can: up to a point, the publication of the interview is the moment used to measure freshness (and it certainly isn't several days after itself), so that the article is carrying its own portable news event around with it, like the snail that carries its house on its back. (Granted, it also matters when the interview actually took place, and what external events may have occurred in the meantime, but those are generally smaller effects.) Please study the detailed history of edits during review. I try to make my changes in separate edits, each of which has a specific edit summary and can be viewed with a diff. In this case, there were several edits that altered the paragraph boundaries, which confuses the wiki software so it can't provide a useful diff; these make it impossible to do a useful diff of all the changes made, though you can view the changes in about three diffs, deliberately looking at the collections of changes between these. The problem edits are, iirc, the two that remove paragraph breaks, the one that adds an infobox, and the one that adds an image. 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 1933179 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 18:39, 23 June 2013 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: There were significant neutrality problems. The presentation of the article was itself biased in some ways. Part of this is phrasing that introduces bias (note for example my removal of a couple of "however"s and an "ironically"). Part of it is a liability of "summarizing" what the interviewer said rather than actually reporting what they said. Good interviews are mostly direct quotes; the best ones are generally transcripts. In this case I don't think a transcript would have come out well, because of my second point about bias: The interview itself had neutrality problems. Leading questions. It isn't enough to report about the interview neutrally, the interview itself should be conducted neutrally. Some of the questions seemed to be fishing for a response. This impression was further strengthened by bias in the way responses were summarized: The interviewer would say (I'm exaggerating/simplifying some to illustrate my point) "I've heard it said that X", and when the interviewee responds with something similar to X and doesn't actually object to X, the interviewer reports that the interviewee said X. In one case, I changed a passage to say the interviewee "acknowledged" X; in another, I removed the entire passage, noting the interviewee actually hadn't said X, and what he did say was presented immediately thereafter by a direct quote. The lede still had some problems; I tried to shore it up, but was uncomfortable that on one hand I was pushing the limits of what a reviewer can do without getting too involved to review, and on the other hand I wasn't making as large a change as would ideally be called for. Remember the lede is supposed to identify the focal news event. The original lede had tried to present the expression of new criticisms as the event, although it's not clear to me that any of the criticisms reported on here are actually new as such. But with a full-blown interview, the interview itself is the event. This is the essence of why an interview can stay fresh for many times longer than a synthesis article can: up to a point, the publication of the interview is the moment used to measure freshness (and it certainly isn't several days after itself), so that the article is carrying its own portable news event around with it, like the snail that carries its house on its back. (Granted, it also matters when the interview actually took place, and what external events may have occurred in the meantime, but those are generally smaller effects.) Please study the detailed history of edits during review. I try to make my changes in separate edits, each of which has a specific edit summary and can be viewed with a diff. In this case, there were several edits that altered the paragraph boundaries, which confuses the wiki software so it can't provide a useful diff; these make it impossible to do a useful diff of all the changes made, though you can view the changes in about three diffs, deliberately looking at the collections of changes between these. The problem edits are, iirc, the two that remove paragraph breaks, the one that adds an infobox, and the one that adds an image. 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.