Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2009/September

Reviewers not reviewing

We seem to have a problem with reviewers not actually reviewing. Puerto Rico swine flu death toll now at seven was marked as ready for review on the 22nd. The two reviewers to have touched it in the six days that it has been listed as ready for review at the Newsroom didn't bother to actually review it but simply marked it as stale. Similarly, Canonical releases source code for Launchpad was marked as ready for review on the 24th. Again, it was touched by two reviewers, but the only thing that they did was mark it as stale. Wikinews isn't going to work if reviewers don't actually review. Uncle G (talk) 12:53, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Two answers for 2 articles:

1) The first article was originally unfit to be published, so no one published it. By the time it was fleshed out (by you), it would have needed to have been published within a few hours in order to meet our three day deadline: Wikinews articles must be about events that took place no more than 3 days before publication time. In this particular case it wasn't reviewed within that very narrow time window. If a story is completed in a more timely fashion then the timewindow for completing the review is usually about 2 days, so it doesn't matter if an article sits there for a few hours. It will still be good.

The fact that this article had an unusually narrow time window in which to be reviewed wasn't helped by the fact that all of the sources were non-English. Non-English sources usually need to be read by someone who can read the language in question. That significantly reduces the pool of potential reviews. For reviewers who don't read the source language, well, sure Google translate helps the reviewer get the general gist of the article, but personally I have a hard time publishing any article in which I can't verify that the article isn't violating copyright. That's impossible when I'm only getting a very vague, approximate, machine translation of the text. Thus, I can't verify copyright, and I can't pass the article.

2) The second article was stale before it was written. Even if it had been reviewed 10 seconds after it was completed, it would have been deleted. That story was more than a month old when the person started writing it. Hence the fact that it was immediately tagged with {{Stale}}. Gopher65_talk 16:33, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Newsworthiness

What minimum factors are required for a Original reporting story that makes a newsworthy article to be get published in Wikinews. Zainichi Gaikokujin [talk] 14:28, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

It depends a lot on what you're reporting on. Usually, articles that pertain to a topic of at least a local or regional importance are newsworthy enough, but news aimed at a very specific audience might not be. I suggest you take a look at the content guide, which has more information on what makes a newsworthy article. Hope this helps. Tempodivalse [talk] 16:53, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Announcement

Cross-posting, please see WN:AAA. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 21:13, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

New daily article record 20 (now 21) articles in a day!

I'd like to congratulate all our contributors for breaking a record - on September 12 we published twenty articles. That's an average of one article every 72 minutes. Great work, everyone! Let's see if we can keep up our pace. Tempodivalse [talk] 00:14, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

BACK TO WORK SLAVES!! --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 00:35, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Challenge: Let's make 25 tomorrow. :) –Juliancolton | ^Talk 00:55, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

wow. Bawolff ☺☻ 01:10, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

I think the record is 21 or 22 actually. Set in maybe 07 or 06. but nonetheless this is awesome! Keep it up :) Oops. I see its 24 for today. Awesome guys. Really makes me happy! DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 01:18, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

not to put a damper on enthusiasim, but category:September 2, 2005 has 24 articles as well (it was day 2 of meta:IWWC). this is awesome. Bawolff ☺☻ 01:23, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Wow i would have expected the record to have been much later. That is actually quite good for being so early in Wikinews history. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 01:28, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually the all time record it 27 articles on April 6, 2005. That being said, this is a record for us since we've instituted the review system (which is a major change). And the most we've had in 2009 prior to Sept 12, was 16 articles in one day. --Master of article statsShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 20:59, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikinews on Facebook

Wikinews on Facebook is dreadful. Whatever auto-posts (I suspect an RSS scraper) gives the article title twice, no link to the article, and no use of any pictures in the article. It also repeatedly posts stories when the title changes.

What can we do about it? Do we need to drop back to manually posting stories using the {{social bookmarks}}? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:56, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I assume we could improve the script. First step would be figuring out who controls the script (We should really have a page that lists all the various twitter facebook, etc autopost things, and who owns them). Bawolff ☺☻ 17:54, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Another option is to include the Twitter messages in Facebook. That way you only have to add the messages to Twitter and they'll automatically be added to Facebook as well. Cheers, Van der Hoorn (talk • contribs) 11:00, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

that seems to be the logical answer, Van der Hoorn. I'll suggest it to SGN. --SVTCobra 00:09, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

The Facebook application can be found here. Cheers, Van der Hoorn (talk • contribs) 18:51, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I have been informed of this issue, it is on my list of things to do. I've looked up information on their external API, but I've never worked with it before and it isn't nearly as simple as Twitter/Identica so it will take me a little bit to get something working. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 20:57, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I would be seriously opposed to feeding stories through the 140 character limit of Twitter and then on into Facebook. That's just stupid. Facebook allows far more detail as well as images to be included when posting a link to a story there. What I want to see is the same as you have when you post a story to Facebook via the social bookmarks template. I would also highlight that several people, including Jimmy Wales, have complained that the auto-posted stories on Facebook are effectively useless. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Newsflash Special Report at 5' - Wikinews has been invaded by tabloid editors?

I come onto the site and what do I see? A scrambled mess about random bullshit I don't care about, that looks like it was, and often does in fact cite nothing but tabloid sources. Where's the unbiased reporting of important and controversial issues? Where's the reporting of important news no commercial news service would report? Where's digging out the truth from behind the spin and bias? And what does anybody freaking care who won amercia got idol brother 8?

/rant

I agree with you, in a way. I'd rather prefer to see more of the serious, international news on the site, and less of the celebrity/entertainment stuff. However, our users write about the topics they are interested in, we can't oblige them to write on certain topics - this is a completely volunteer site, after all. There's nothing in our policies that says we can't publish entertainment news. And, if you want to do something about it, you can always try writing an article yourself on a topic you think Wikinews needs to cover. Tempodivalse [talk] 12:56, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Lockerbie

Those of you who have and check may be wondering if I ever did go to last night's Lockerbie film screening. Well, I did and I'm working on a special report for Wikinews, so worry not. BTW, know who Richard Marquise is? Google him. I've got his email address :-D - anything you want asked? I also have Jim Swire's and should be able to get Robert Black's, although most legal questions I can get answers to without going to him. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 22:25, 30 September 2009 (UTC)