Welcome to Wikinews

A nice cup of coffee for you while you get started

Getting started as a contributor
How to write an article
  1. Pick something current?
  2. Use two independent sources?
  3. Read your sources before writing the story in your own words?. Do choose a unique title? before you start.
  4. 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.
  5. 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, CalF! 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
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.

The core policies
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.

Find help and get involved
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.


-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 13:41, 17 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Hi. I gather this is the account to notify. Article found not ready; see review comments, detailed history of edits during review.

The first article submitted to Wikinews is often the most difficult, as one learns the basics. It's not (alas) uncommon for the first article not to make it to publication, given the time constraints (see WN:Fresh). --Pi zero (talk) 19:08, 17 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Published. Congratulations.
Unfortunately, we'd somehow lost track of a request in my earlier comments for sourcing on devo-max and devolution. I coped re devo-max, but not the final paragraph. See my review comments. Substantive changes to the article (such as restoring the lost final paragraph, with sourcing) are only permitted for the first 24 hours after publication; at the 24-hour horizon, the archive policy kicks in. --Pi zero (talk) 19:34, 18 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

I'm curious — now we've gotten everything straightened out — how that edit happened. It looks as if your edit restoring the final paragraph undid the publishing edit. Were you editing the page revision from just before publication? --Pi zero (talk) 20:13, 18 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

I think I might have been accidentally editing an earlier page revision.

Well, there are two things I should point out about that. The lesser point is that you shouldn't have been trying to edit that version: it had an {{under review}} tag on it, which says not to edit it but instead to put comments on the talk page. The greater point is that the software should not have allowed that to happen; it's what I was thinking might have happened, and rather alarming to think the software might have allowed it. --Pi zero (talk) 00:58, 19 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Review queue

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Hi! You submitted an article, Never Getting Back Together, for review. Please mind that the review queue is for articles that are about to be published -- if the story is fresh but unfinished, it would normally be tagged with {{develop}}. Thank you. Gryllida 00:31, 19 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Please stop

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Please stop clicking "please review this article", for pages clearly not ready for review. -- Cirt (talk) 00:48, 19 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Welcome to Wikinews

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Just wanted to welcome you to Wikinews. :) Late but yes. Welcome. :) Thanks for contributing articles. I hope you stick around and keep up the good effort. :) --LauraHale (talk) 10:31, 20 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thank you CalF (talk) 10:34,20 October 2012 (UTC)

Flagged Revisions

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Wikinews uses Flagged Revisions, which may-well, and looks like it has, catch you out regarding templates in-use on the main page being editable.

You could-well edit something like the main lead, but then look at the main page and not see your changes. That's because it needs okayed by someone with the reviewer privilege. Were you to check Recent Changes, you'd see the change as "pending". It is needed for our Google News listing, but means that we can allow anyone to change the main page, with a reviewer 'sanity check'.

Earning reviewer privilege is not difficult, a handful of articles without serious issues usually does the trick. Then you can play with WN:MAKELEAD to your heart's content. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, How would I go about applying to become a reviewer? Thank you CalF (talk) 21:19, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

You're not nearly ready yet, tbh. You've a positive attitude and you're working hard, but you've a lot of core concepts still to grasp. --Pi zero (talk) 21:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

I didn't mean for now. I meant when I felt I was ready to apply. CalF (talk) 21:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Heh. Oh. If you look at the top of Special:RecentChanges, after the line with the numbers of articles, users, reviewers, and admins, there's a couple of lines (or so) of lists of tasks for the community. One of those says "Flagged revs requests". The number of them atm is zero; but if you click on that number, whatever it is, it takes you to the page where such requests are made and discussed and voted on by the community. --Pi zero (talk) 22:02, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Libya

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Hi. I'm currently a bit stressed out because of a number of things going on right now. I don't really have the energy to devote to a story like that, which would require a lot longer to review if it is closer to publication. The last time I looked at it, it was a bit jumbled and confusing, like two completely separate stories awkwardly married into one. Half the article is about the HRC report and the other appears completely disconnected from that. That's a time sink to sort out. --LauraHale (talk) 21:17, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

I concur, and that was the essence of my review. --Pi zero (talk) 21:57, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Libya take two

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Hi. You've put a lot of really, really hard work into the Libya article and I would hate for some version not to get published. The easiest way to go right now is probably as follows: Start from scratch with a new article. Focus on the most recent material. Back this up in the lead and focus on the new stuff. Do not mention the HRC material there. Develop the new article with the two recent pieces and then, using the pyramid style writing, integrate some of the HRC information in where it supports the narrative of the most recent news or put it last. Thing of a NEW headline for this article that focuses on the recent stuff. --LauraHale (talk) 23:35, 22 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Published. See history of edits during review.

Hopefully, my edits during review illustrate what I had difficulty expressing in earlier review comments. As we're long known at Wikinews, it's often hard to explain techniques for achieving "distance from source". Some time ago I started a how-to on the subject, but it was very difficult to write and I still haven't gotten very far. (If you're curious, my fragmentary pre-pre-draft is at User:Pi zero/How to use sources without plagiary.)

I've not done nearly as well as I'd wanted to today on review, but somehow I did get that one review in; publication was apparently less than two minutes before midnight UTC, which in theory is an arbitrary line, but has big psychological significance: to have an article about Monday night's debate labeled "Friday" just wouldn't look good. --Pi zero (talk) 23:19, 25 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

The punchline of the joke (on me) is, of course, that it was an hour and less-than-two-minutes before, UTC. (Which makes no functional difference since I was on the right side of the line, but, there it is.) --Pi zero (talk) 23:57, 25 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Qatari leader visits Gaza

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Please see review comments and detailed history of edits during review. --Pi zero (talk) 23:57, 26 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Comments

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Don't edit other people's comments. Use the reply button, which is there for that purpose. --Pi zero (talk) 00:19, 27 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Sorry. Somehow I never saw the reply button. --CalF 00:23, 27 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Perfectly understandable. Liquid Threads (LQT), our wiki extension for Opinions, has a pretty crumby interface. For the specialized purpose of Opinions pages, it's better than using an ordinary wiki page, which Wikinews did for years; ordinary readers wandering in from the internet don't know wiki markup. But it's not as good as any of the standard blog-comments software. --Pi zero (talk) 00:40, 27 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Assessed not-ready. Please try your best to address the review comments; the better you get at this, the easier reviewing your articles will be, and (hopefully :-) the more things will speed up. --Pi zero (talk) 03:32, 27 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Published. Thanks for what you did, and of course I did some more. --Pi zero (talk) 19:49, 27 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Updating articles

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Just a couple of notes that may be good to keep in mind tomorrow. You may well be aware of both of these ("I know that already!"), in which case they're just reminders. :-)

  • Sources added to a Wikinews article after publication must not have publication dates later than the publication date of the Wikinews article. So the Sandy article can't have sources dated October 30.
  • No substantive changes are allowed more than 24 hours after publication (that's when the archive convention kicks in). For the Sandy article, that's 18:28UTC.

--Pi zero (talk) 23:52, 29 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Great work

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Thanks for the hard work on adding the Bloomberg section to Obama and Romney enter final strech of campaign for US Presidency. —Tom Morris (talk) 22:56, 1 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

That's fine. Hopefully it will be published soon :) (talk) 11:01, 1 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Award

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I Pi zero award CalF the Exceptional Newcomer Award for contributions to Wikinews. --Pi zero (talk) 17:53, 17 November 2012 (UTC)Reply

Published. Two things.

  • You need to work on the distance-from-source thing. See detailed history of edits during review.
  • HotCat can do multiple categories in a single edit; tell it you want to add a category, then before clicking 'ok', start to add another. Then you can tell it to do a bunch of things, and click 'save' when you're done.

--Pi zero (talk) 04:49, 23 January 2013 (UTC)Reply