Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2011/July


Just curious

As the number of news on the wiki grows, choosing a title for the articles will become an increasingly difficult task. What should one do if a news with the title he has chosen already exists? Reformulate the title? If so, will this work forever? -- Petru Dimitriu (talk) 15:42, 3 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

News events that are likely to repeat should have time-dependent phrases in their titles (e.g. use "election 2011" rather than just "election"). The likelihood of the exact same event happening again is very unlikely, though. So I think we'll be OK for the foreseeable future - in the unlikely event that something does repeat exactly, a reformulation of the title will be possible. DENDODGE 15:54, 3 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The Style guide says to "tell the most important and unique thing". There should be something important and unique to say about its happening again, perhaps even the fact that it's happening again. "Generalissimo Francisco Franco dies for second time". --Pi zero (talk) 16:17, 3 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We'd be pretty poor journalists if we couldn't come up with unique titles for a very, very long time. I note one "fail" on these grounds at the moment - a football match report with "TeamA 1 - 1 TeamB". A useless headline, and there are so many variants possible for that. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:16, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In a case like that, for example, one might consider "TeamA draws one-all with TeamB in second round of 2011 FA cup" or something along those lines. There will never be another second round of the 2011 FA cup in which those two teams get the same score. Ever. (That's not the best title for some other reasons, but it gets across the point about originality). DENDODGE 18:35, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

page ratings

What scores are normally considered "good" according to Wikinews standards? While most of my articles have gotten scores of 3 or 4, I've gotten a few 2s, such as US children who celebrate Independence Day more likely to become Republicans, says Harvard study. To what extent do we let reader feedback affect our own standards of quality? Ragettho (talk) 15:40, 6 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Those ratings are entirely reader-based. Readers can also read other sources and use those to rate. Those ratings acan be or can not be accurate, because sometimes not many people participate in the overall rating.
  • Wikinews standards are the WN:FA and the publish process.
--Gryllida 02:58, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]