House1630

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Brian McNeil / talk 12:21, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Anonymous users

We don't invite anons to open an account quite as curtly as that; see {{Howdy-anon}}, and don't subst it. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:22, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't give a damn if you're intimately related to those IP addresses or not. Don't use that message. It's borderline rude to someone who prefers not to open an account. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 09:59, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I apologised to those IPs. House, our unregistered users are a valued part of our community and the system here is spefically designed to allow them to edit unrestricted. Please stop giving them a hard time. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 11:36, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

RE:stale articles

See, actually Wikinews doesn't publish articles older than 2-3 days. You article was created on 26 october and its sources are of 23 and today it is 29. You have been given a lot of time to find sources, edit it, etc. Now it has to be deleted. Srinivas 10:40, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Germans don't want to build any more nuclear power plants

A significant problem turned up during review, but with prompt action it may be possible to improve the article in time to review and publish before it becomes stale. See the article talk page. --Pi zero (talk) 21:17, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

The problem with Portals on Wikinews

Hi,

I see Pi zero has rolled back your edits to Portal:Germany. Two reasons: We don't edit articles into portals, everything runs off Dynamic Page Lists (DPL) which should only list published articles in places like portals; second, until we've a "robust" output for a topic, region or country, portals are something that was imported from Wikipedia at the inception of Wikinews without understanding the problems of keeping them current.

Talking hypothetically, if we'd a dozen people working on Portal:Germany to contribute and review a at least a dozen articles per week, the portal would be well-worth having. Somewhere-or-other I've put together a swathe of templates that would make it look like a Germany-specific version of the main page too, which is just like you'd get on a mainstream news site (where they can afford to have those dozen contributors).

I also know Pi zero is finishing up a review on the article in question, and the problem is non-English sources. I'm struggling to find a nice way to put it, but if I say: "The vast majority of US and UK citizens are monolingual", and: "The subtleties of a foreign-language news report cannot be pulled out with machine translations to a quality that permits confident reviewing" I would hope you'll get the thrust of the problem. We probably need an essay on non-English sources and reviewing, and some good examples of contributors helping clarify what parts of an article draw from non-English sources, and explaining the most-appropriate synonyms where a machine translation would let the reviewer down. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 20:06, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

A joke I heard once, here in the US, ran like this:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks many languages?

A: A polyglot.

Q: What do you call someone who speaks only one language?

A: An American.

--Pi zero (talk) 20:15, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

It's a really good joke - but the Main article in the Portal:Germany is more than TWO years old! --House1630 (talk) 21:30, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

• This is a problem we're painfully aware of; and, it's why most portals are redirects to the category. As I said above, there's a "critical mass" thang for portals being useful.

We don't want to discourage you, just to set expectations appropriately and clue you in on what some detractors call the "un-wiki approach" of independent peer review. de.wikinews has as-yet not adopted it, or we'd be able to take the machine translation from there and work on verifying there were no mistranslations in using it as a source. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 21:50, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

And the Main article in the Portal:France is more than THREE years old ! --House1630 (talk) 21:54, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

There has been nothing newsworthy in France for three years; they still eat cheese and drink wine. :P

I've redirected it to the category, that at least uses a DPL to list most-recent articles. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 15:31, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Bremer Freimarkt, oldest fair in Germany, reaches its climax

This is a difficult article, presenting a number of challenges, and we don't seem to have been communicating very successfully on what the difficulties are. I really am trying to be supportive, but I'm struggling with how to do that, as I'm not really sure what, if anything, I should be saying that I haven't been saying. Worse, I have no idea whether the article can be saved, which makes me worry that the help I'm struggling to provide is only going to create more disappointment if the article doesn't work out.

At any rate, my latest review comments are here. --Pi zero (talk) 14:49, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm hoping to take a shot at this this morning (it's 10am local where I am). Obviously there can be no promises, on a volunteer project, but I'm really hoping. --Pi zero (talk) 14:09, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm starting to look at it.

The first thing I've noticed is, looking at your remarks on the talk page section #Original reporting, you say that some of the background information is the result of your own research. If you mean, by this, that some of the background information in the article is not from the cited sources, then your original reporting notes need to explain just which background information that is, and just where you did get it from. This is part of what original reporting notes are for: Every fact in the article needs to be verified and documented; if it doesn't come from one of the cited synthesis sources, then the original reporting notes need to do the verifying and documenting. --Pi zero (talk) 20:00, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Published.

Please see the review comments. I tried to be detailed in my comments, hoping to help things go more smoothly in future. --Pi zero (talk) 05:03, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Qatar announces to produce solar cells next year

Thanks for your help with the article and re-submitting it for review. I added several lede style questions on its talk page; if you're familiar with the sources already, addressing them might be trivial and may help toward the success of the next review. --Gryllida 12:51, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Famous house in old city of Bremen sold at public auction

Hi. In present form, the article is not-ready for publication. The short-short version: we need detailed reporter's notes. I've gone into much greater detail on that, and mentioned a couple of other problems to be addressed, in the review comments. --Pi zero (talk) 19:01, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I tried to review the article, but immediately hit a snag because of the synthesis sources. Please see the review comments. --Pi zero (talk) 19:31, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Brussels update

NYT is paywalled... or at least it is for readers in the US. We'd need a free-to-read source. --Pi zero (talk) 17:44, 22 March 2016 (UTC)