Three Sixty

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 15:27, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Great job!

Congratulations on the article you created! Hope you stick around! BigKrow (talk) 04:06, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

@BigKrow: Thanks, and thank you for your formatting help! I've been on Wikipedia for a little while, and I hope to stay here as well. Thriftycat (talk) 14:37, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Very good!!! BigKrow (talk) 00:50, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Congratulations

Congratulations on your first published article. It was one of the better written early efforts I have seen in my nearly 18 years here (OMG, I am so old). Some writers like to set up a Wikinewsie category to track their work. Yours, if you so choose, would be Category:Thriftycat (Wikinewsie). I hope you stick around even though there can be many disappointments with submissions not getting reviewed in time. Cheers, SVTCobra 22:25, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Well done! BigKrow (talk) 22:27, 3 January 2024 (UTC) Template:Cookies

Thanks! Thriftycat (talk) 22:44, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Haha, I'll create the category. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the review. Thriftycat (talk) 22:44, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot

Hi. Now it's time for the old dog to ask the newbie for advice. How do you successfully run ArchiveBot on Wikinews articles. I have used it on Wikipedia, but never been able to get it to add archive links to our sources here on Wikinews. I have seen you have done it. Any tips? SVTCobra 23:20, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: To be honest, I'm not sure what happened there. (I'm assuming you're referring to the bot's edit of the recently published article.) I did not ask it to do anything, and it only modified existing archive links that were manually added by me. They were already working, so I have no idea what it was trying to do. Now that you've said this, I tried using the management console to add archive links to a couple draft articles, but none of them worked. So, unfortunately, the newbie can't help you with this. :)

I noticed that there's a page on Meta for reporting problems with the bot. Perhaps we should talk to the devs? Thriftycat (talk) 23:53, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, we should. They added Wikinews to the dropdown box, so clearly they intended it to be used here. It's probably configured for footnote notation which we don't use. I wonder, if you didn't trigger the Bot, who did? Cheers, SVTCobra 00:15, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

@SVTCobra I don't know. On enwikipedia, when someone runs the bot it usually registers the edit under the user's name, not the bot's, like so. So maybe the bot is running itself?? Thriftycat (talk) 00:21, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I thought Bots were made by actual users? BigKrow (talk) 00:26, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

They are, but they can be anywhere on Wikimedia projects. Also, there are often multiple people working on them. This one has two listed operators, but it is usually best not to contact these busy people if we are just confused about how to use a bot. We can contact them if and when we are sure it's not working as intended. SVTCobra 00:30, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Well, I don't have time to go deeper this evening. If IAB could work here, it would really save me time when I archive articles. And since you added the links manually, thanks doubly. SVTCobra 00:27, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Thrifty, it seems IAbot knows how to interact with our style of citing sources, see this edit. I just don't know who triggered it and seem incapable of triggering it myself. Cheers, SVTCobra 14:45, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Yep, I’m pretty much stumped. I did some sandbox experiments without success. The only thing I can see is that it seems to like when the archiveurl parameter is already specified. Thriftycat (talk) 16:19, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Alabama executes prisoner using new method

Capital punishment in the United States

Hi Three Sixty, I really like your new artcile currently stuck waiting for review. It would be a shame if it does not get published just ecause it loses freshness. As it is the articles now appearing on the front page are all several months old, I think? Anyway I was also wondering if you like the image to the left.

Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 23:55, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech - Thanks for the message! I do like that image. Looks like a good candidate to add to the article. I don’t take ownership of articles I create, so please feel free to boldly improve it with any other ideas you have :) Thriftycat (talk) 00:01, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

FYI, it's out-of-date. There are some current maps on Commons. Heavy Water (talk) 01:04, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Alright, I’ll look into it. Thanks. Thriftycat (talk) 01:06, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

@Heavy Water: Are you referring to File:Death penalty in the United States with hiatuses.svg? Thriftycat (talk) 02:35, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

That's probably the best one, yeah. Heavy Water (talk) 02:41, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Great. Done Thriftycat (talk) 02:51, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to reply and ping me, Three Sixty. WN has some unusual policies, and since I visit here so sporadically I prefer not to "edit" articles that are awaiting review. I don't know for example if such articles are sent to the back of the queue every time an edit is made. As it is I see this article is #6 out of 7 waiting to be reviewed. I worry this article will be added to the heap of deleted articles that never got reviewed before they lost freshness. Ottawahitech (talk) 15:07, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

The review queue is not literally a queue. At Category:Review, the main review queue ("Current review queue, not under review:") is ordered by date submitted for review (so no, making an edit wouldn't affect the ordering unless you took the article off the queue and resubmitted it). I don't think anyone anymore follows that order in choosing which articles to review. For myself, like others, one of the factors I look at is how old the focal event is, with some priority given to the newer ones, actually, to give more time for a not-ready-revision cycle and ensure articles are fresher when they get published. There are, of course, a lot of other factors like what the reviewer has time for. Heavy Water (talk) 18:36, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi Thriftycat. This article went stale yesterday as I was reviewing it (I had to be absent for a few days there, unfortunately, so that delayed my getting back to the review). I know you're on wikibreak, but I wanted to mention a few things that would've been in the review comments, for the future (written here since you would be liable to not see any messages on the article's talk page before its deletion).

• Using the Commons version of the map risked incompliance with WN:ARCHIVE, since there's reason to expect the map will be updated in the future, and an en.wn article is a "snapshot in time", so it has to reflect the situation as it was at the time of publication. Locally uploading the current version of the map is one solution. This is my fault, because I should have thought of this when I suggested using a map.
• I encountered multiple factual flubs and a few paragraphs after the lede needed work on distance from source. Substituting in synonyms or making similar changes that maintain the same structure (of a sentence, paragraph, etc.) as a source can't do the trick alone, there needs to be original presentation. WN:Pillars#own explains this much better than I can. There's also a rule of thumb about not having any phrases of at least three (or four) consecutive words identical to source phrases, and advice one should read the sources before writing, then check the product against the sources.

Nonetheless, I can certainly say you're doing much better than I was at your level of experience. Heavy Water (talk) 19:03, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

@Heavy Water- Wow, thanks for taking the time to write me this! I'm expecting to mostly step back for a couple weeks, but when I return, I'll keep your points in mind.

I had an idea that might help me avoid the factual inqaccuracies and/or make reviewing a little easier. I could create a separate version of articles I create (maybe in user space). The second version would be identical, except that it would use Wikipedia-style inline refs for every claim. This would also help me fact-check myself, I think. The second version could be deleted once drafting/reviewing was completed. What do you think? Thriftycat (talk) 19:13, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

The verifiability facet of review involves more than just verifying that one of the sources supported a fact. The reviewer also has to check what, if anything, other sources have to say about that matter. Disagreements between sources can't be ignored — they have to be addressed, for example by using attribution or backing off to a weaker claim both/all of those disagreeing sources agree on. As to what you're proposing, reporters sometimes use invisible comments in the article (<!--this-->) to indicate sourcing to reviewers; one of the experienced reviewers, however, has said this is not a good idea because it can lead to reviewers falling into the trap of confirmation bias in relation to sources' support for a fact (related to what I was saying earlier in this comment). Heavy Water (talk) 04:41, 4 February 2024 (UTC)