Brittany

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Getting started as a contributor How to write an article Pick something current? Use two independent sources? Read your sources before writing the story in your own words?. Do choose a unique title? before you start. Follow Wikinews' structure? for articles, answering as many of who what when where why and how? as you can; summarised in a short, two- or three-sentence opening paragraph. Once complete, your article must be three or more paragraphs. If you need help, you can add {{helpme}} to your talkpage, along with a question, or alternatively, just ask? Use this tab to enter your title and get a basic article template. [RECOMMENDED. Starts your article through the semi-automated {{develop}}—>{{review}}—>{{publish}} collaboration process.]

Welcome, Brittany! Thank you for joining Wikinews; we'd love for you to stick around and get more involved. To help you get started we have an essay that will guide you through the process of writing your first full article. There are many other things you can do on the project, but its lifeblood is new, current, stories written neutrally. As you get more involved, you will need to look into key project policies and other discussions you can participate in; so, keep this message on this page and refer to the other links in it when you want to learn more, or have any problems. Wikipedia's puzzle-globe logo, © Wikimedia Foundation   Used to contributing to Wikipedia? See here.

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Write your first article for Wikinews! Use the following box to help you create your first article. Simply type in a title to your story and press "Create page". Then start typing text to your story into the new box that will come up. When you're done, press "save page". That's all there is to it! It is recommended you read the article guide before starting. Also make sure to check the list of recently created articles to see if your story hasn't already been reported upon.

-- 04:51, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Timeliness

Hia! I just saw your article on prison torture. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to meet Wikinews' requirement for a news article to be timely. News has to be 'new' by definition (new is part of the word, after all;)). If a story is more than a few days old, it ceases to be news and becomes encyclopedic content. At that point the information in the article should be added to Wikipedia rather than Wikinews.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your writing needs to go to waste. There may well be updates in the prison torture scandal story that would warrant the creation of a new article. When that happens, a lot of the material that you wrote for this story could likely be used as background material for that new article. (Just think, when you read a BBC article, you get 1 paragraph about recent developments, and the rest of the article is background information. That applies here too.)

I've moved the article in question to your userspace here, along with the associated talk page. That will save it from deletion, and allow you to reuse most of your work when updates to this story happen. Gopher65_talk 22:06, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Also, please consider reading this short help page about article writing. It gives some great advise that will help you get your articles published in a quick and timely fashion. Gopher65_talk 22:17, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Manually editing templates

Hi! I just saw your edit on the Bahrain story, where you manually edited the tasks template, ultimately leaving a broken template behind. In future, if you want to move the story back to review, after changing it, simply click the "Change" button in the tasks box, and the system will make the necessary changes for you. Regards, BarkingFish (talk) 00:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)