User:Pi zero/essays/reporting/example

I'm going to try to keep a log as I write an article. Amongst other problems, this will significantly increase the time and effort involved in the writing process; but either the log that is written, or the attempt to write the log, may prove useful, one way or another.

• Looked through the google news aggregator, hoping to find a story mentioned that would capture my interest, so it'd be something I'd be interested enough to write up. After looking through a bunch of US stories, most related in some degree to Brett Kavanaugh and all rather depressing, and some international stories that just failed to capture my interest, I encountered a story about a scientific study saying human intervention delayed the onset of the Sahara desert by 500 years. That sounded interesting.
• Only one source was listed for the story. That one source said the results of the study were published in Nature Communications —which would be suitable as a focal event, if it occurred recently enough— but didn't provide a link to the publication and didn't specify when the publication occurred. So I gave the news aggregator a keyword to search for, "Sahara", and looking down through the list I found a second source, which also failed to specify when, but did provide a link to the paper, and the paper listed today as the date of publication. So I decided to try to write it up, using those three things as sources.
• Deciding to create the article as a place to preserve my choice of sources, before stepping away to do few tasks that needed doing off-line, I called up WN:WRITE for its article-creation form — and immediately faced the problem of choosing a headline. Of course the could be changed later, but it's good to have a viable working title, to set the tone and to minimize the potential for later burden on the reviewer. This headline was not an easy case. Key elements to mention are the Sahara, humans/nomads and/or pastoralism, the 500-year delay, desert, and the scientists or the study. Mentioning the scientists or the study is important because the attribution prevents endorsing the claims of the study. Both secondary source make the poor choice to make the headline an outright endorsement of the claim; the study itself does better, with a headline that says it may have delayed the onset. Putting the attribution at the front of the headline, such as "Scientists say ...", diminishes the impact on the reader of what was said, can get rather monotonous if most scientific headlines have that form, and tends to put all such articles in just a few clumps in alphabetical order that have nothing to do with the specific content. Putting the attribution at the end, such as "..., scientists say", may run the risk of underemphasizing that it's a claim rather than a fact. And in this particular headline, the claim we're trying to express is rather difficult to say with a very low word-count, because it involves so many elements.

  One source orders the elements as (humans, delay, desert, 500 years); another, (nomads, delay, desert, 500 years, pastoralism); and the paper itself has (pastoralism, delay, desert). Figuring the practice was more important than where, and also more important than explicitly who; and also figuring that the technical term pastoralism would not be instantly understood by many general readers, I settled on "Sustainable grazing may have delayed Sahara desert onset by 500 years, study says".

• Next step is to familiarize myself with the story, overall; so, set out to read the secondary sources and at least skim the paper, keeping in mind the paper could be too technical or too long to fully absorb. Set up a list of the five Ws (and H) to jot notes in while reading, and added an extra entry to the list for jotting notes on significant aspects of the story one might consider addressing in an article. As I got into the sources, I found that the secondary sources were inadequate to support the basic aspects I'd noted down. I couldn't tell clearly from them, what the claimed timeline of events in the Sahara was, and felt that mostly they were presenting the punch line of the study without giving the reader much information from which to build insight into why the study reached its conclusions (though the phys.org article does have one paragraph in it about a 'novel model'). Thinking of the fact-based vs opinion-based dichotomy, presenting the conclusion without explanation encourages an opinion-based worldview, encouraging readers to polarize according to whose conclusion they prefer to believe. So I ended up studying the paper itself more energentically than I'd thought might be needed.

who	team from University College London and King's College London (the secondary sources mention both; the paper indicates all three authors have positions at UCL, one is also affiliated with KCL)
what	study considering overuse vs pastoralism pastoralism postponing onset of desert conditions in Sahara
where	for study, see who ; Sahara is large region of northern Africa
when	study on Monday. Saharan green 14.7—5.5 kya, collapse 5500 ya, dry event 8k–7k ya, susceptible 7000–6000 years ago, pastoralism 6500–5500 years ago. hunder-gatherers/fisherfolk from 10.5kya ; from 7kya, domestic cattle/sheep/goats
why	green Sahara induced by orbit. study to assess the over-use theory.
how	evidence including greenhouse gases to identify when the green period should have ended, and how many humans were living in the area; people were still there for circa 500 years after the green period should have ended
aspects	what pastoralism is, and alternative hypothesis of overuse. when we're talking about and why the climate was changing then; African Humid Period. when and where pastoralism occurred. what's new with the approach in this study, and what was found.

• At this point, I made a direct attempt to write full article text. With some articles I've taken private notes quoting passages from various sources, sorted by topic; but that didn't seem to fit the shape of the information on this story. A reasonable three-paragraph text covered the major elements the story plausibly, but two concerns remained: it felt a little dry without some sort of quote, and the i source seemed somewhat underutilized. A quote drawn from the i source might solve this, if its content was suitable to tie up the end of the article. I therefore chose one for the purpose.
• An interesting point was that corralling animals at night causes a concentrating of dung there, which can become an important fertile spot lasting thousands of years. The i source said Brierley had made this point, but then quoted "study author Fiona Marshall" on this point, not making it as clear as it ought to have been that Marhsall was the author of a different study, published earlier this year. Quoting Marshall was starting to get complicated, and I felt if I ascribed this interesting point to Brierley I'd want to ascribe the information to i, since in the absence of a direct quote about it by Brierley I felt less than 100% sure of i‍'s ascription of it to Brierley. So I didn't try to work that interesting point into the article.