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

sub-editing, factchecking, ... "junior reviewers"

What, as an open-ended question, might allow Wikinews to open an alternate path to reviewer?

Two reasons for this: First, UoW are looking positively at the standards applied to student work - but, know our review-time limitations; actually making students do reviews until the community trusts them to know the copyedit &c would also be valuable to UoW.

Second, there are many Wikipedians with great fact-checking skills, good copyediting, and the essential 'nose for copyvio'. These are the people doing DYK, bringing stuff beyond stub status, and refactoring to the WP MoS.

For both, we could do with guides (aa close-as to CBT as we can provide).

For the triple-word-score at buzzword bingo, we need some "blue sky thinking" on how non-article-creators might demonstrate skill to qualify for reviewer. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 21:27, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Getting better at training up reviewers is one of three main fronts I see where enhancements can improve our reviewing capacity (the other two are teaching newcomers by means other than review (yeah, yeah, such as the wizard), so their submissions take less reviewer labor to review; and providing tools to facilitate the tasks reviewers perform). The WN:Tips on reviewing articles page was also on the reviewer-training front, and perhaps the fact I never felt I'd finished Tips, and no-one else ever really got involved, is because this stuff is really hard to know how to do.

The more involved an editor is in cleaning up articles, the more opportunity they have to absorb how things work and accumulate trust of the community. For example, after my apprenticeship of mostly copyedits to published articles, I requested and was readily granted reviewer. On the downside, my apprenticeship lasted something like a year, and moreover, at the end of it I still didn't consider myself ready to review articles for publication (in my nom I only claimed to know enough to not do things I oughtn't).

There's a potential for COI in one UoW student reviewing another UoW student's work. We should think about how we're going to play that. At my school, undergrads weren't usually allowed to TA undergrad classes (though grad students were assumed mature enough to TA grad classes — conveniently, since otherwise there'd be no TAs to help with grad classes — sounds rather like reviewers, actually).

I thought wp had a no-copyright-paranoia principle that clashed with Wikinews culture. --Pi zero (talk) 11:14, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I think it would be differing years were there any overlap between one group contributing and another reviewing.

Not quite sure what you mean regarding WP. Although, they did have rather "anguished" discussions on license changes. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 12:40, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Just noting, in my experience, the designated "year" of a college class doesn't at all guarantee what year its students will be in. Some schools will be more flexible in this than others —smaller schools are likely more flexible— but e.g. intro classes aren't only taken by first-year students (especially when the students are double-majors, or taking an intro class outside their major), and the more advanced a class, the more room there is for differences in the unique class sequences followed by individual students. Some "fourth year" classes at my school were about half fourth-year students and half third-year students, with sometimes an exceptional second-year student mixed in.

I'll have to poke around on wp, but I distinctly recall a principle there about avoiding copyright paranoia; they don't draw much on other encyclopedias, and don't generally draw on sources that see what they're doing as an an economic threat, so how careful they are, or aspire to be, would naturally be different. --Pi zero (talk) 13:47, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I thought the "no encyclopedias" rule was due to the fact that tertiary sources are considered unreliable. I never came across anybody citing copyright reasons. DENDODGE George Watson 17:37, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Whatever the reason, they aren't drawing on the for-profit publications they're competing with, and that means the sources they are drawing on don't have a strong financial motive to go after them. In contrast to our relationship with most of our sources. --Pi zero (talk) 18:20, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

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We do need to do better on providing a route to reviewer for journalism students. So far, no UoW students have become reviewers, and indeed, given how busy students are with their academic work, it should be vastly easier for them to accumulate experience here if that experience is curricular rather than extracurricular.

A general observation:

• Wikinews needs to draw on a pool of idealist believers in the value of journalistic integrity and the fourth estate (that's what we're all about — learning it, teaching it, and applying it to what citizens want to cover — especially original reporting). We get great people from Wikipedia and other wmf projects sometimes, of course, but our ideals are far enough off the mainstream of Wikipedia that hot recruitment prospects from there are at a fairly low density. There is a high density of just our sort of idealists among journalism students — it's a natural recruiting ground for us.

--Pi zero (talk) 15:42, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

• • That, I agree with completely. However, what I found with the final-year students was they thought like "columnists" - not journalists. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 18:28, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

This very topic has been on my mind lately.....will comment here more later. --Bddpaux (talk) 19:01, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Arbitrary section break

(Looking forward to your thoughts, BddPaux. :-)

If the final-year students were somewhat lacking in idealism, it may have been because they were final year. Having been through three separate degree programs, I can testify first-hand that in the final year of a program, you're mainly concerned with getting it over with, no matter how idealistic you might be under normal circumstances. --Pi zero (talk) 19:42, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

• I'm going to pontificate about this,begging your pardon if I ramble just a bit. Like it or not, each project is, a kind of community unto itself. As such, there is here a kind of hierchichal pecking order that just naturally exists. I think many reviewers forget what it's like for fledgling reporters to see, that review template saying, "(Essentially) your article sucks and so do you." Now, mind you, journalism is about the greater good of the thing.....the truth, the news...... whatever, but newbies are just that....they stumbled in the front door here (just like I did) and thought, "Cool, I've always been fascinated with journalism."....and then work up their first article only to get that icy review template that says, "Um, yeah.....but no." .....and then most sulk away, crying. This is only made worse by our insanely slow review turnaround times. Now, I'm really prattling on about two different things, but they are inherently linked together......training up reporters and training up reviewers. I really do think it would be cool if we could have (I dunno) an "academy" for cub reporters and a mentoring program for reviewers.....I know that's lofty, but some people can be really great with just a little bit of hand-holding. As my kids just will not leave me alone I've got to wander away, more later. --Bddpaux (talk) 22:13, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

You remind me of something I've hesitated to say because it sounds superficial, but I think it's really very important. The alternative to "pass" shouldn't be called "fail". Seriously. Someone in the past day or so asked Brianmc for help because I'd "declined" their article — not only did they not approach me about it, but they clearly perceived it as essentially a final decision, rather than a request to make improvements and resubmit.

Perhaps Not ready (or even Not yet)? --Pi zero (talk) 23:44, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

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Here's a thought that might speak to multiple issues at once (on whatever schedule we were able to implement it).

• Rather than having just two basic roles commonly involved in an article — author and reviewer, usually with just one person in each role — what if we were organizationally set up to have three roles: author, reviewer, and... struggling for a good name for this... assistant. When a newcomer author's work is reviewed as "not ready", an assistant comes by to help address what's wrong. There's nothing now that prevents this from happening, but we'd want some organizational means to encourage it.

Advantages of this arrangement:

• Repairs too big for a reviewer to effect without becoming too involved —hence, disqualified from reviewing— could still be addressed by someone with some experience. Right now, the burden of such major repairs fall squarely on the shoulders of those least qualified to handle it (i.e., newcomers).
• Newcomer authors would receive help, both making them feel more welcome, and increasing the chance of their work getting published.
• Assisting might provide good experience for the assistant as well as the assisted, furthering the training of both.

There should likely be some device distinguishing situations where assistance is wanted, above and beyond merely {{tasks}}. (Maybe something involving a hidden category?) Newcomers should get assistance by default, but even some newcomers may wish to 'opt out', preferring to attempt repairs themselves; and experienced users may well wish to opt out, though some may want assistance, either in general or under some particular circumstances. --Pi zero (talk) 18:50, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

• I really don't want this topic to degrade into the ether....I think it's got some solid merit. --Bddpaux (talk) 05:22, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

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What happened to the bot that was updating this page?--Hallows AG (talk) 06:43, 12 October 2011 (UTC)