69.140.152.55

Welcome

Welcome!

69.140.152.55, welcome to Wikinews! Thank you for your contributions I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

Our key policies - if you read anything, read these!

• Wikinews:Neutral point of view - tell every side to a story in a fair and balanced way
• Wikinews:Cite sources - everything in a Wikinews article must be sourced

Here a few pointers to help you get to know Wikinews:

• Wikinews:Introduction - overview of the site
• Wikinews:Writing an article - how to write and publish a complete article
• Wikinews:Content guide - what's suitable for Wikinews
• Wikinews:Style guide - how articles should look before publishing
• Wikinews:Contents - the contents page.

There are always things to do on Wikinews:

• Existing articles need expanding and checking for spelling and mistakes
• The front page lead articles often need updating
• Developing stories need finishing and publishing
• Discussions need your input
• And of course, stories need writing!

Here are some other hints and tips:

• I would recommend that you get a username. You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikinews, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires no personal information (not even an e-mail address), and there are many benefits of having a username. (If you edit without a username, your IP address is used to identify you instead.)

• When using talk pages (the "collaboration" tab at the top of the page), or the comments pages (tab "opinions"), please sign your name at the end of your messages by typing four tildes (~~~~). This will automatically produce your username (or IP address) and the date.

If you have any questions, you can ask them at the water cooler or to anyone on the Welcommittee, or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome!Cirt - (talk) 22:45, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

April Fool's Day

I can appreciate the hard effort that you put into your article. And while I certainly do not speak for anyone else here at Wikinews, I think you can see from Media round-up: April Fools' Day 2008 that these pranks are usually carried out by media that do not provide serious up-to-date news. I don't think that The New York Times had a prank nor France's Le Monde (though you might want to check). In my opinion, our reputation as a news outlet is already too fragile to tamper with. But as I write this, the time has expired anyway. Nonetheless, I thank you for thinking of us and I hope you join us for more serious news-reporting. --SVTCobra 01:04, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

News briefs, February 12, 2008

I request that Wikinews Shorts: February 12, 2008 be archived, instead of deleted. The fact that the election was extended in Maryland because of weather, but not in Virginia, was notable, and the weather being the way that it is, something similar might happen in the future. Also, it being related to an election (unlike other material normally covered in brief) makes it worthy of archiving instead of deletion. 69.140.152.55 03:18, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I am sorry, while development of this article was substantial, it never got published. Since the needed improvements were not made, someone tagged it abandoned and I deleted it after the two-day warning for abandoned articles. It would be against Wikinews policy to "resurrect" this article and publish it as news from Feb 12. In fact, it would corrupt our archive, which seeks to capture the news as it was on any given date, and by that I mean what news we had available for our readers (not necessarily that which could be found elsewhere). If we had more contributors, I am sure that your article would have gotten improved to the point where it could have gotten published in a timely fashion. I don't mean to discourage you, but rather encourage you. We need more people and I hope you join us. --SVTCobra 23:59, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Md. Amber alert

See my talk page for full reply. --SVTCobra 14:08, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Sources

Hi. We don't use footnotes for articles but rather a template at the bottom. Could you place all your sources in *{{source|url=|title=|author=|pub=|date=}}? Please see the relevant section at the Style guide. Thanks for the very interesting article. --PatrickFlaherty (talk) 23:52, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikinews policies and practices

As you can see from the policies and guidelines, Wikinews policy reflects the way things are done.

It is not traditional at Wikinews to thank news sources for being news sources, just as it is not traditional to sign your edits to an article (there's already a permanent record of everything you've edited, so you don't need to sign them) or allow editorial comments within a news article. At the same time it is traditional to use the date format FullMonthName DD, YYYY and to sign comments made on talk pages and to source every single factual statement in an article.

Each of those traditions is policy on Wikinews, and not all of them are written down. - Amgine | ^t 03:12, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

While the majority of the original reporting may be from a single source, that is strongly frowned upon at Wikinews. We much prefer to use a multitude of sources, covering the full range of current news coverage of an event. This is why the Wikinews intro describes our primary "type" of article as an aggregation. - Amgine | ^t 03:25, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, then, I added value to the article by aggregating information from another source or two. (See the last paragraph of the article.) And it is good that the story got posted to Wikinews, even if it be a mere summary of Los Angeles Times coverage; otherwise, I would never have heard of this major news story at all. 69.140.152.55 03:29, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for improving the article! - Amgine | ^t 03:30, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

No need to thank me – thank Wikinews for bringing this new development to my attention. Although the question of whether a crash was caused by a signal malfunction or by operator error always was in the back of my mind, I had previously thought that operator error was far more likely. Without Wikinews I would never have been aware of the witness accounts, originally reported in the Los Angeles Times, that cast serious doubt on the driver-error theory. 69.140.152.55 03:38, 7 October 2008 (UTC)