Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2010/December

Coronation Street at 50

Could I please have some assistance with creating Wikinews:Story preparation/British soap opera Coronation Street celebrates 50 years on air? I was thinking that we could make it into a featured article. The show is hitting 50 years this week! --Rayboy8 (my talk) (my contributions) 14:34, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Concerningly inaccurate Wikileaks coverage

I am most concerned at some of the half-assed attempts to cover Wikileaks' cable releases recently.

Early last week I had to completely rewrite one story, fail another and restart it from scratch. Plus, virtually every attempt to cover the issue has been nowhere near Style Guide compliance.

This morning, for the fifth time I've failed the article that mentions PayPal stopping passing on donations for unsourced rumour.

I would like to stress that those writing articles on Wikileaks, or content of leaked cables, should take extra care. Likewise for those reviewing.

Where cables are involved in a story; original research and archive trawling is needed. If you've never done this work before, I doubt you should be attempting it on something as nuanced as 'diplomatic language'. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 11:13, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

As a side note: Wikileaks is releasing the documents so press and the public may examine the original documents. en.WN has long history of preferring an original document over a second-hand source, even a well-respected second-hand source. I believe it would be not unreasonable to expect any Wikileaks story to include citation to the original cables. - Amgine | ^t 16:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

• Thank you Amgine! That is a significant part of the point I wished to make.

For the Spanish story, I went through all cables released at that time from the Madrid embassy. Then, I went looking in the Google News archives, searched the web in general, and even read some of those 'unreliable' Wikipedia articles. ;-) There are excellent, in-depth, stories to be drawn from the Wikileaks' exposé. That requires real research, not regurgitation from the mainstream; consider them simply a pointer to a possible good story and, don't conflate multiple, distinct, stories into an incoherent mishmash.

Last point I feel is vital to hammer home: Nobody has yet issued warrant(s) on the basis of treason or espionage. Pay more attention! Don't report echo-chamber gossip that has no factual basis. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:15, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Original reporting artices should be moved to user pages not deleted.

I am disappointed my article Ireland and WikiLeaks, Secret - Not for American Eyes was deleted, as the the talk says - I am still waiting for relevant cables to be released. The article should have been moved to my userpage not deleted. At least a note on my userpage would have been a courtesy. Mrchris (talk) 12:26, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Done User:Mrchris/Ireland and WikiLeaks, Secret - Not for American Eyes. --Pi zero (talk) 13:01, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Census

I would be indebted to you all if you were to fill out my little census on how active users are here on Wikinews. I have been running a census like this one biyearly on Simple English Wikipedia, and it has proved useful in gauging how active the project is; and it is a useful statistic when fielding questions from interested parties, such as, recently, a professor at the University of Queensland. I plan to run the census again every couple of months in order to build up the statistics over time. Regards, — μ 18:18, 13 December 2010 (UTC)