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User:Pi zero/essays/fragmentary advice

< User:Pi zero‎ | essays

Stuff that ought to be folded into somewhere at some point.

Definitely a case of "please give as-much feedback as-possible" with student contributions. The two profs who, currently, throw students at us do so because we're hard when it comes to review — moreso than they're likely to see in tutorials and such. Subs- and Copy-editors were amongst the first to go when the mainstream press started to feel the pinch. It's because we're old-fashioned and still do that, that we're considered a valuable resource for teaching.
If you've not heard of it, one of the best ways to get criticism taken onboard is called the — ahem — "shit sandwich". Say something complimentary, give your criticism, then something positive encouragement-wise. Don't be afraid to point them at the style guide, repeatedly. As typical students, they don't tend to read the instructions until nagged to do so. ;)
--Brian McNeil / talk 00:37, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
If I might offer a perspective. There's a — for lack of a better term one might call it student mindset, in which one expects implicitly to be fairly graded (whatever that means) and doesn't really think about those who grade, except when one feels they've deviated from upholding the expectation and therefore finds fault with them. It doesn't really take too much to disrupt this mindset (in fact, looking at it squarely may be enough to do so), but in my case I suspect I didn't move away from it until about the time I got my B.S. and moved on to graduate school. I remember in a department colloquium early in my graduate program, a professor remarking to students in the audience something like, 'This is the last place you will be in your life where those judging you are trying to be fair.'
It's not the case that Wikinews reviewers are here to 'grade' you. Nor is it true that they aren't; the truth is just in a different direction. Reviewers are here to enable the operation of a news site. Our community-driven peer review system works best when the reporter and reviewer are both well familiar with project standards and practices, and are both striving for publication of quality journalism. To that end, reviewers also want to do the best we can to help along newcomers struggling up our steep-but-thankfully-short initial learning curve, so they can become the sort of Wikinewsies who help our system work at its best, and as a special case of that, we want to help students along. That's mixed in with the primary news-site function of the project. And of course every reviewer is an individual volunteer, pursuing these goals in their own way and in the context of whatever else is going on in their life at the moment.
--Pi zero (talk) 14:05, 17 August 2013 (UTC)
Covering new scientific results on Wikinews
Hi! I saw you'd created an article about region-like particles. I wrote some comments there, but wanted to say things here, too, where I can phrase things more in terms of people writing things rather than in terms of the particular article.
Covering newly published scientific results is definitely something Wikinews can do. To make it work, though, it needs to be in the form of one of the kinds of news articles that Wikinews publishes. Your first try on the region-like particle thing came out kind of encyclopedic. The two main kinds of Wikinews articles are synthesis and original reporting, and each of these has been used successfully to cover new scientific results on Wikinews. (For a compact overview of the project, I recommend WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing.)
  • A synthesis article is about some specific event that happened within the past day or two — three at the very outside, by the time it's been written reviewed and published. For a new scientific result, the specific event would be an announcement or the public release of a scientific paper (usually these two things happen at the same time, so they're a single event). We have a two-source rule for synthesis, calling for at least two mutually independent, trust-worthy sources corroborating the focal event. There are usually some secondary sources that come out just after the publication itself, providing a bit of somewhat independent perspective on it. It can be quite difficult to pull all that together fast enough (news coverage does tend to be about racing a deadline), but we've sometimes managed it. Here's an example of a successful article of this kind:
Of cabbages and things: Dutch researchers study wasp hyperparasitoid
Alas, in the particular case of your region-like particles thing, the publication isn't recent enough.
  • Another — quite challenging, but if it works well, highly rewarding — approach is to contact a researcher involved in the result and ask for an interview. This requires planning things out carefully; OR requires really intensive documentation, a really successful interview needs really well-thought-out questions, and is best conducted once one has a bit of experience with Wikinews writing (gained through synthesis writing), and thus also accumulated reputation on Wikinews (on the philosophical underpinnings of that, see WN:Never assume). Here's a good example of a successful Wikinews article of this kind:
Wikinews interviews Dr. Michael Mazilu on creating world's fastest spinning manmade object
--Pi zero (talk) 11:58, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
I think we should consider the connection to Serie A and La Liga too weak to justify category inclusion. We've had tension for years (probably ever since our category hierarchy was set up) over the difference between a category as a place to find articles specific to a topic, and a category as a union of its subcategories. When the union is very much bigger than the topic, use for union can preclude use for topic, as with Category:North America. I've still not figured out how to resolve the problem in general, but in this particular case I suggest we should be setting these up for topic use rather than union use. --Pi zero (talk) 13:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
  • First of all, it isn't apparent, off hand, that there is anything relevant (for a rational person) about somebody making a claim like this. People claim crazy things all the time. For such a claim to become relevant, there would certainly have to be something unusual about it; and that something would feature prominently in both the headline and lede — the headline is supposed to "tell the most important and unique thing", while the lede is supposed to — in the process of succinctly answering as many as reasonably possible of the five Ws and an H — show the focal event is newsworthy; and relevance is one of the three basic elements of newsworthiness.
[...]
  • Think about this. YouTube doesn't carry significant trust-worthiness with it as a publisher, though when one is dealing with, verifiably, an official social-media account of a reputable party, that can be different. And the other source is clearly engaging in gossip; their article is an interesting demonstration of, on one hand, carefully not technically presenting the claims as true (which is correct journalistic practice, and would be correct even if there were some reason to take this claim seriously), and on the other hand, using emphasis and juxtaposition to create bias without technically saying anything obviously false. (There could be some falsehoods sprinkled through there, although in this case that article has the general feel, to me, of trying to avoid saying anything technically false; there are certainly outlets with less reality-related attitudes.)|time=11:49, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
  • One way of thinking about the focus of a news article is that it defines the form of the article; it may be possible to get distracted by asking what contextual situation the article is "about" and then trying to write the headline and lede while thinking about that context rather than about the focus. Extending (or overextending) a metaphor, if a news article is a "snapshot in time", perhaps the focal event is specifically what you aim your journalistic "camera" at. By choosing the right place from which view it, how narrow or wide the angle, and such, a well-composed snapshot can capture a great deal of context; but you have to choose a specific thing to take the picture of. Here's an example from our archives (a formidable example, as this one has featured article status):
The focal event is very specific, the conclusion of a trial, something that happened on a specific day. The headline describes that specific event. The lede is two sentences, the first of which provides succinct answers to about four of the five Ws (along with perhaps a dash of how), the second sketches a somewhat wider picture, providing more who and what [and where] and, in the process, a sense of why it's all important. And then the article as a whole encompasses, within its inverted pyramid, the whole story from the start of the disaster.
  • Text I wrote, but then rejected as needlessly abstract, when drafting a comment on possible deletion of an underpopulated category.
We don't want our category-curation burden getting out of hand. We want to think about abstract categories as we add them, to give the category system a useful overall shape, that's easy to navigate. We don't want categories on non-relevant topics.
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