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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! 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.

All Wikimedia projects have rules. Here are ours. Listed here are the official policies of the project, you may be referred to some of them if your early attempts at writing articles don't follow them. Don't let this discourage you, we all had to start somewhere. The rules and guides laid out here are intended to keep content to high standards and meet certain rules the Wikimedia Foundation applies to all projects. It may seem like a lot to read, but you do not have to go through it all in one sitting, or know them all before you can start contributing. Remember, you should enjoy contributing to the project. If you're really stuck come chat with the regulars. There's usually someone in chat who will be happy to help, but they may not respond instantly.

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Places to go, people to meet Wiki projects work because a sense of community forms around the project. Although writing news is far more individualistic than contributing to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, people often need minor help with things like spelling and copyediting. If a story isn't too old you might be able to expand it, or if it is disputed you may be able to find some more sources and rescue it before it is listed for deletion. There are always discussions going on about how the site could be improved, and your input is of value. Check the links here to see where you can give input to the running of the Wikinews project.

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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.

President creates Chimney Rock National Monument‎

Hi. In its current form, I assessed the article not-ready for publication. Please see review comments; also, history of edits during review may be of interest. --Pi zero (talk) 21:49, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Categories

We're pretty circumspect about creating categories on Wikinews; we generally require at least three published articles for a category before creating it (that's down from a historically larger number, I think it used to be at least six), and we generally try to more-or-less-fully populate it when created. Categories with only one or two published articles are usually easy targets for WN:DR. --Pi zero (talk) 16:51, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

• Certainly don't dispute creation of those categories, but we "usually" only do so when we can put a handful of articles into them.

At some point a search will get done for older articles to fill out the categories, but if you see any which match the categories you've created, let me know or post links on WN:AAA (since older articles are fully protected per archiving policy). --Brian McNeil / ^talk 19:55, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Article going stale on the review queue

Some "inside" perspective on this phenomenon, in general.

It happens even when there's much more available reviewer labor than there is at the moment. When review-labor supply goes up, so that output goes up (after a time delay, of course), demand goes up too, until demand exceeds supply. Much-sought-after improvements to the system should change the constants in the equation, but one strongly suspects there will always be a shortfall — if review standards are to mean anything (and the project would have no value if they didn't), one must be willing to see some articles exceeding supply go stale awaiting review.

We do get articles (not all, demonstratedly) reviewed in a timely fashion. When there's competition on the queue, often I (for one) will choose to review on the young end of the review queue, i.e., the articles most recently submitted, because if published they will be the freshest, and if found not-ready they will have the largest amount of time for problems to be corrected. I started tending toward this approach when I realized that when demand really does exceed supply, reviewing from the old end of the queue won't get more articles published but will make every review harder and more stressful for the reviewer and less useful for the writer (because one lacks the realistic option of sending the article back for improvements), may get fewer articles published (because those sent back won't get fixed in time), and will minimize the freshness of the ones that do get published. --Pi zero (talk) 18:13, 1 October 2012 (UTC)