User:WhaatTF/advices

This is a page where I put constructive crtisism/advises for ease of access.

• When writing an article, in general, it's a good idea to start by assembling your list of citations of the sources you're going to draw on. Keeping in mind that documenting the sources actually used is the purpose of the Sources section of an article.
• Each Wikinews article is built around, or so-to-speak hung on, a focal event. Something specific, relevant, and fresh; those three criteria, together, are the basic elements of what we call newsworthiness. The lede (first paragraph) is a brief summary of the focal event, and should show why it's newsworthy. A good rule of thumb is that if the lede doesn't contain a "day" word — "today", "yesterday", or the name of a day of the week — there's probably some difficulty with newsworthiness, because if the focal event didn't happen recently enough to be described by one of those words, it isn't recent enough for freshness, and if it's hard to pin down a recent date for the event, it may not be specific enough.
• In comparing this text with the sources, I readily found a quite lengthy passage, stretching across multiple paragraphs, substantially identical to source. There could be others; I stopped at the first of those found. As advised (compactly) at WN:PILLARS#own, while you draw theinformation from the sources, the presentation should be original — including the overall organization, sentence structure, all the way down to avoiding distinctive word choices. There shouldn't be more than three consecutive words identical to source, with obvious exceptions like people's names and titles. (Besides the compact advice atWN:PILLARS#own, there's also discussion of this atWN:Plagiarism
• At the top level, generally organize the information differently than the sources do.
• At a sentence level, avoid using the same grammatical structure as a corresponding source sentence — for instance, don't just take a sentence and replace words with synonyms.
• At the lowest level, avoid verbatim sequences of more than about three words, with obvious exceptions like people's names and titles. Also avoid distinctive turns of phrase (that don't have a specific technical need); for example, if a source describes something as happening "once in a blue moon", presumably you wouldn't put it that way.

February 2020

• As submitted, this listed six related news articles, and seventeen external sources.

• I'm deeply unsure how much of this comes from in-house sources ("related news") and how much from external sources. There's a mention of protestors Wikinews interviewed, which indicates some in-house sourcing.
• Something I suspect may have happened here, in part at least, is that that material may have been drawn from in-house, and then external sources were listed here that were used in those past in-house articles. Maybe that's not what happened; maybe some (or even most) of the material was really drawn directly from the external sources of the in-house material. To be clear (in case), when in-house material is used, don't also cite its sources unless they were actually used to draw additional information that wasn't in the previous in-house material that used it. (It would be helpful, btw, when drawing material from in-house sources, to label those related-news items as used for sourcing, either by html comment or by reporter's notes on the article talk.) It is far more review labor to cope with an external source, as we need to study it in-depth and assess its properties as a source, in comparison to the relatively trivial labor involved in drawing on one of our previously published articles, which have already been thoroughly vetted. If this article had cited six in-house sources and two external sources corroborating the immediate focus, the whole review might have been done fairly quickly.
• A basic technique in journalism is to accumulate, gradually over time, a corpus of in-house material on an ongoing story, so that it can be easily drawn upon; it's a labor-saving device. Unfortunately, here I envision much mentally draining work, studying the external and in-house sources and sorting through which external sources are redundant.