Wikinews:Australian discussion/archive

First Post

Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! The bellman 03:42, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Oceania page

To kick things off, what do we think about the Oceania portal page thing? Should we keep the current format, or make it more like the Main page (with articles grouped by date rather than by topic)? This is my prefernece, because at the moment we produce a very small number of articles, and it looks silly to have empty categories, or categories with articles weeks old. - Borofkin 04:20, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

hmmm... well ive got no real objection to a rearange, it would be nice if one day we had enough articles to divide it up better. but atm, maybe youre right that it would look better all clumped together. I think that we need to start thinking about how to divide things up site wide though. so that we have ten or so core cats that all articles are put in. Similar to the list we have in Oceania atm. Cause one of the things i really like about Wikinews, is that it can work as a research tool (for wikipedians among others) and if we give everything a cat as its created it will be easier to search through. The bellman 04:27, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, the categorisation seems a bit haphazard so far. I've been putting my articles into Category:Country (for each country that is relavent), and then one of the broad categories if I can find one (e.g. Category:Politics and conflicts). - Borofkin 04:31, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Great re-oragnisation borofkin. Do you think we should add a link in Oceania to here? The bellman 06:49, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yep, the link to the Bureau looks good to me. We also need to think about this entity called Oceania. Does it make sense to group those countries together on one page? The current regions are the result of an arbitrary decision made at the beginning of the wiki. Should we perhaps move our efforts to an Australia page? Or Australia and New Zealand? We could link directly to them from the main page, in the More News From box. In general I oppose having links from the Main Page to region pages that aren't being maintained by anyone. - Borofkin 22:15, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Or we could move this page to WikiBureau Oceania, we would still be well and truely australian dominated, but could also cover NZ the pacific islands and PNG. Ambi wants to change the name of the Bureau anyway, cause she really doesnt like the down under name, which is fair enough. thoughts? The bellman 22:41, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I've got no problem changing the Bureau name to something less colloquial, but I'm not entirely happy with Oceania. It's an ill-defined region, and I've hardly heard the term used anywhere else. If we must be in a region (rather than just moving to a straight Australia regional/local news page), I think we should be in Asia or even something like Asia Pacific - Borofkin 23:41, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

well the thing about asia pacific is that there is already the region of Asia, so then asia-pacific sounds a bit odd. We could split up asia into middle east (already seperate) west and ceteral asia, east asia, and asia pacific in which we could include ourselves, Indonesia, PNG, East Timor, NZ, and the pacific isiles. Or we could use south east asia but that really excludes the pacific isiles, and i think some australians and kiwis would object to being lumped in as part of asia, rather than asia pacific The bellman 01:59, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't see why any of these region pages should exist if there is no-one maintaining them. Using a "bottom-up" rather than "top-down" approach, new articles should go onto the Main Page, and then if some contributors want to focus on a specific region or locality (such as Asia, Australia, or Parramatta then they move their efforts off onto another page, and possibly only link to articles from the Main Page when they have global appeal. - Borofkin 02:20, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

just on a side note: an idea which ambi had (on IRC) was that on the requested articles thing in oceania we should use red links cause then we dont waste namespace. If we were to do this we could then put something of the form [http://abc.net.au/news/foobar ref] after it, so that someone can come along later and start the article. The bellman 05:00, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I was thinking that myself. What I'm trying to do is divide up the labour, so that people who are good at researching can do that, and people who are good at writing articles can focus on writing rather than having to muck around with creating bylines and sources and other mundane stuff. I'm also looking for the Wikinews equivalent of a Wikipedia stub, because a stub seems to encourage people to add to it, where they might not have created the article to start with.

Sometimes I don't feel like writing (and I don't think I'm particularly good at it) I just feel like doing some kind of support activity. - Borofkin 23:34, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Parliament

So Parliament comes back from the summer recess on the 8th. Does anyone want to try and organise a feature article in advance? I'll be in canberra on the 8th, but i honestly dont know if i'll have loads of free time or not, or even if ill have an internet connection or not. However there is a chance that i will be able to take some PD pictures for us; but i cant give any gaurantees. The bellman 05:05, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I start a new job next week so my daytime web-surfing will have to be seriously curtailed. With you away as well, unless we can attract some more contributors, I fear that Oceania is going to grind to a halt. - Borofkin 05:13, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Have no fear, the patron saint of the internet, has wikinews in the palm of it's hand, and will make sure no harm comes to it. Or something like that anyway The bellman 22:36, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'll be able to step in and give some help. I'll also be down in Canberra not long after The Bellman, so I can probably help with parliamentary coverage as well. Ambi 09:00, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

February 21

Pretty quiet in here - anyone still around? Abmyers 03:22, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm still here, but not editing. New job, no time. - 129.94.6.30 04:59, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough. I'm doing what I can but also has to be after working hours. Abmyers 22:59, 22 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Go The bellman!!

Congratulations to our very own The bellman, still in the Wikinews:Writing_contest race after 10 days! - Borofkin 04:24, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well i figure if aussies can win every kind of sporting comp, we should also be able to win wiki comps. ~The bellman | Smile 15:21, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

And don't forget our very own Simeon who is also still in. ~The bellman | Smile 14:26, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ahh, my apologies Simeon. Congrats to you too. - Borofkin 02:10, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Get some life back into this place

Hey kids,

Does anyone else live in Canberra (or somewhere close by...)? Cause i do (sort of anyway), and im interested in doing some OR for when the new senate sits on July one. It would be cool if we had a bunch of people in the public galleries (or even better the press galeries if we could manage it) updating the site in real time, blow for blow. We also have to get a whole heap of background stuff ready. This could be a really good opitunity to prove we are the equal of other news organisations, and to build up our cred amongst bloggers and the likes, and so increase our aussie traffic, and take us one step closer to world domination. :P so what do you all think? I want to see if i can contact some wikipedians who are from canberra to lend a hand aswell. ~The bellman | Smile 11:59, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

DynamicPageList

Since we don't keep it up to date, I've redone the Oceania page with the DynamicPageList feature. I also created Australia. - Borofkin 02:12, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

More AFL / NRL Coverage

According to the Media section of The Australian (p. 20), the second most mentioned item in Australian news media the past week (after the budget) was AFL football; with 15,080 mentions. NRL got 8,502, and was the fourth most talked about category. If WikiNews is serious about covering Australian news, given that sport (both major football codes especially) constitutes such a large part of the news, perhaps we should increase the coverage of sports? - User:AmishThrasher

Richmond is no. 3! Shouldn't that be the top story! Seriously, if the coverage is to be meaningful to myself it needs to be comprehensive. I want to see all the results of the week and top stories in one place. I don't expect to come to wikinews for that.

Corby verdict - story preparation

If any Aussies happen to be paying attention, I'm working on Wikinews:Story_preparation/Corby_verdict_released. Feel free to jump in and add info and your predictions. - Borofkin 02:33, 27 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Original reporting

Is anyone doing or thinking of doing original reporting? I've created a resources page with links to primary source material such as media releases. It's all government at the moment, but if anyone has any other stuff please add it there. - Borofkin 00:35, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]