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! 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) 09:34, 14 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hello. The article you recently made, is listed in review. But! As per WN:LENGTH, it is not long enough. The WN:LEDE of the article is also weak. Thus, I am changing the {{review}} template to {{developing}}. I am placing the {{expand}} tag as well. Better formatting and some more information would be perfect!
14.139.242.195 (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Congrats on the publication, btw. :-)  --Pi zero (talk) 11:28, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Mourinho to appeal £50k Football Association fine

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I'm hoping I'll be able to take a closer look at this in a few hours, if somebody else doesn't get to it first (though one lesson I've just about got through my thick head by now about Wikinews is, as a volunteer reviewer, never make promises about future review). Meanwhile, a couple of thoughts:

  • The headline and lede should be written for a general audience (that's the seventh pillar at WN:PILLARS). Don't assume the reader knows who this person is, or what country or sport is involved. Also beware of abbreviations: if a general audience isn't going to know it, explain it on the first instance.
  • The two main functions of the lede (sixth pillar at WN:PILLARS :-) both call for saying on what day the focal event took place (cf. advice for question "when" at WN:five Ws and H).
  • You may find the HotCat gadget, under the gadgets tab at Special:Preferences, useful for adding categories; it puts category add/subtract/change controls at the bottom of the page and has some degree of autocompletion (although, for some reason I've not quite worked out, the autocompletion sometimes misbehaves).

--Pi zero (talk) 15:50, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Many thanks Pi zero. I'm also unable to create links to Wikipedia pages from Wiki News articles, it doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure why. Do you know what this could be? --LegereScire (talk) 16:10, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

The markup you want uses the {{w}} template, like this:
{{w|France}} would produce France
{{w|France|French}} would produce French
The {{w}} template does a bunch of things for us, starting with automatically implementing our policy that wikilinks should link locally if there is a local target — it looks first for a local target (which it finds in that example), and only links to en.wp if it doesn't find the target locally. --Pi zero (talk) 16:39, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Many thanks Pi zero --LegereScire (talk) 17:59, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Alas, I had some difficulties in the review. Review comments.
Just in case (btw), I should point out that although during review I may tweak a few passages to increase their distance from source, what I produce by doing that is not a good model for how to write synthesis. I'm constrained, by the need as a review to stay sufficiently independent of the writing of the article, to make only small changes. What's really wanted is to arrange things altogether differently, from overall structure all the way downward. With the best synthesis, there's no similarity of structure at the large medium or small scale, each sentence in our article is likely to contain important stuff from distance points in sources and perhaps from multiple sources, and fragments of information from a given source sentence are likely to end up in distance points in our article. (It's actually quite an eye-opener to review a synthesis article like that, for appreciating just how far "use your own words" can go; I really want to find some way to write a help page, or interactive tutorial, or something, that allows newcomers to share that from-the-inside-out view of good synthesis.) --Pi zero (talk) 00:26, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Pi zero. Apologies for the errors. The article was probably written too quickly and I think I need to look through some previous articles to understand the requirements for Wiki News. It might be best to delete this article and start again at some stage? --LegereScire (talk) 08:08, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Deletion takes care of itself, with a little time: after about four days (usually), an article without activity is tagged {{abandoned}}, and after another two days, deleted. Six days may sound like a long time, but its size is chosen (afaics) to be sufficiently large compared to the news cycle to avoid ambiguity: by then the deletion is pretty certain not to step on anybody's toes (not even good Samaritans who might want to step in and save an article).
Looking through published articles seems a solid approach. There's also the sequence WN:PILLARS WN:WRITE WN:SG; our style guide, the end of that sequence, is deliberately made very short by the standards of such documents so that it can be read straight through (the style guide of a major news org is more typically huge). --Pi zero (talk) 11:32, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Found a bit more similarity-to-source here than I was comfortable trying to fix as an independent reviewer; hoping it can be fixed up, though, and tried to advise in the review comments. (Sorry I couldn't get to it sooner.) --Pi zero (talk) 18:07, 21 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Published. See my edits during review. Your revisions after the first review greatly appreciated; I had some edits to make (as you see), but well within reason and, hopefully, to better final result for starting from a better place. --Pi zero (talk) 15:50, 22 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi Pi zero. Thank you for publishing my recent article. Thank you too for all of the feedback. I'm getting to understand the requirements for Wikinews a lot better now and before any future articles I will study your feedback to ensure any required edits by a reviewer are kept to a minimum. Thanks again, --LegereScire (talk) 08:07, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Suspects detained in Belgium raids

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Published. See review comments, history of edits during review. --Pi zero (talk) 05:06, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thank you! Thanks also for the feedback --LegereScire (talk) 08:27, 24 November 2015 (UTC) :)Reply

Russian navigator found alive

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Note on headline, at Talk:Russian navigator found alive. --Pi zero (talk) 00:21, 26 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

UK begins airstrikes against IS in Syria

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Published. Some stuff I didn't find (guessing disappeared from source), some tweaks for distance. History of edits during review. --Pi zero (talk) 05:09, 4 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Pi zero. Yes, the articles were changing throughout the day as new information was being added. Thanks again, --LegereScire (talk) 07:41, 4 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

German MPs vote for action against IS in Syria

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Published; history of edits during review. --Pi zero (talk) 00:42, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! --LegereScire (talk) 09:48, 6 December 2015 (UTC)Reply

Donald Trump maintains Muslims should face US ban

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I've left a few, hopefully constructive, remarks about this on the talk page. --Brian McNeil / talk 17:07, 9 December 2015 (UTC)Reply