Tommyv7326
Welcome to Wikinews
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Getting started as a contributor
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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. |
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
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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
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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!
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Thoughts on your user page
editHi! Was just looking at your user page. Love what you say about collaboration and open source. I had a couple of small thoughts, and figured I'd share them.
- The project name is typeset as
Wikinews
, rather thanWikiNews
. :-) - I get what you're saying about instant gratification and Wikipedia. More than just the fact that Wikipedia by policy instantly "publishes" edits. Wikinews also has a significant initial learning curve, and even once you know what you're doing, publication takes some time because you have to wait for review (and worse, sometimes it doesn't happen in time, frustrating everyone). On the other hand,
- it's been remarked that writing an article here is technically much simpler than writing an article on Wikipedia; this was from someone with a lot of experience with meeting Wikipedia's Good Article and Featured Article criteria. It's also been remarked our publication criteria are roughly comparable to Wikipedia's GA criteria. Imagine trying to achieve GA status on Wikipedia within a few hours of creating the article, and it's clear why our criteria have to be streamlined. Also,
- contributions to Wikinews, once made, stay put. Any contribution to Wikipedia is instantly visible but then has a half life; if it isn't instantly reverted, it is slowly washed out by successive alterations, and that too can be frustrating. Since a news article is a snapshot in time, it is protected under our archive policy, so contributions here accumulate rather than slowly disappearing.