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) 02:11, 15 September 2023 (UTC)Reply

HotCat, {{delete}}, and Michael Gambon

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Editing with HotCat.

I've seen you do a lot of manual categorization; you may find MediaWiki:Gadget-HotCat.js helpful. Basically, it allows you to edit categorization directly from the category-bar at the bottom of the page (see right) and auto-generates an edit summary. You can enable it in the "Gadgets" section of Special:Preferences. Something else I've been meaning to tell you for a while, please don't use {{delete}} for stale articles (you can use {{abandoned}} as it describes — {{subst:aband}} is recommend as it automatically adds the date).

I've not-ready'd your Michael Gambon article as it's below length and doesn't describe the when. There's good potential in that piece, but at the moment it's really wanting for information. Heavy Water (talk) 02:47, 1 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Marking abandoned

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Hi, consider using

{{subst:aband}}

for marking an article as abandoned. Also, as an author, if you don't wish to edit an article and want to abandon it, tag it abandoned rather than speedy, as others might still work on it. •–• 04:23, 11 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Sorry for my mistakes. Thank you. OhhLord (talk) 22:21, 11 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Handling spam articles

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Hi, as you might be aware, we are getting quite some spam pages created. Looking at it becomes evident it is not a news article. So instead of creating a talk page, I would suggest you tag that article for deletion and let that be. I can nuke the pages created by the spammer, but I might miss the talk page if someone else created it asking "is this news". •–• 23:45, 28 October 2023 (UTC)Reply