Karen

I was originally welcomed by Deprifry +T+ at 15:19 on October 10, 2005 UTC.

My list of things to do at Wikinews

Read and sometimes edit the latest articles

Watchlist - read older articles' ongoing discussions

Edit prepared/developing/disputed/ongoing disputed stories

Delete a story - vote to axe it if it's not worthy.

Newsroom tasks - The page that's "the hub of the Wikinews community."

Polls - usually out-of-date or insignificant, but worth viewing just in case.

Combating narrow scope of reporting

News stories from local papers commonly suffer from reporting their stories in a very localized way, usually assuming the reader knows some background about why the story is important to the location, is familiar with area names around the location, and knows the time zone, cultural, and geo-political background of the location being reported. This failure is understandable for a local paper publishing its printed stories verbatum onto the Internet, but for a medium such as WikiNews, there's little excuse for addressing a limited audience.

To address some of this, one of my goals is to add at least basic background information:

Quickly identify what country or at least what part of the world is the setting of the story. ( Categories should be included, found at the bottom of the article's page, but the first paragraph should mention "where", also! )
Time zone of local time and/or translation from local time to a time most world-citizens can understand: Coordinated Universal Time. Readers often want to know what time an event occured on their local clock if the time of the event was reported in the story.
Measures - Imperial and Metric units can be used with the local units listed first and the other at least mentioned parenthetically for the most important measures of the story (perhaps the length or distance of an event from another, or the size/weight/volume of an object featured in the story).

Additionally, I've frequently corrected "corrections" where local spellings were inconsistently changed. If the story's author (or story location) spells a word acceptablly one way, that's the best way for the word to appear in the story.