Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2012/August

Dealing with problematic prepared stuff

Per the present deletion discussion, as well as this issue, I'd suggest the following to get rid of problematic prepared articles:

• WN:PROD; Unsourced prepared work, or prepared work shown to be largely unsourced, can be deleted ten days after being tagged.
• WN:SD; Prepared articles for which the event in question has passed, but the prepared work was not developed into an article (either beause no article was released or because it was easier to start from scratch) can be deleted five days after the event occurred, without tagging.

I've chosen quite long periods (ten and five days) because they seem reasonable in the context of pre-prepared work, which can be worked upon at quite a leisurely pace. Five days for the speedy because that's the point at which the work really does become bsically unsavable. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 20:48, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

• Support both, per BRS's comments and my comments at the deletion discussion. Bencherlite (talk) 21:59, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
• Support both, as I did at the deletion discussion. I'd been wondering what time bounds to put on them; I like these choices. --Pi zero (talk) 22:10, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Unarchiving and flagging this for more comments and / or implementation. Bencherlite (talk) 10:21, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

This sounds perfectly reasonable. After the event has passed, what reason would we have to keep the prepared article around? I do however think there should be an exception: any article which contains significant OR, such as an interview, should be moved to the userspace of the author rather than speedied. But other than that, yeah, speedy. — Gopher65_talk 12:51, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Question I'm not entirely certain I've understood that first point correctly. Does that mean that every prepared story for Wikinews now has to have sources? And what do you mean 'can be deleted ten days after being tagged'? Tagged with what? --Rayboy8 (my talk) (my contributions) 23:56, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• Yes, facts asserted in a prepared story need to be sourced. On a number of occasions in modern times, a "prepared" story asserting unsourced facts has prevented publication when the event actually occurs; prepared stories are supposed to help speed publication, not hinder it.
• With such a policy, we would fashion tags specific to the purpose, similar to {{aband}} and {{abandoned}}. (In fact, those two templates could use some upgrades, but I've always found other maintenance tasks that seemed more immediately important; presumably if we were fashioning several more templates similar to them, we'd want to do them right while we're doing them, and would probably upgrade the existing ones accordingly while we were at it.)

--Pi zero (talk) 00:23, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

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Again, unarchiving to allow for discussion and implementation. Bencherlite (talk) 09:59, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Imo we've got a reasonable consensus for this (given the nature of the issue), and I don't think we're going to forget about it. When we'll get to setting up the infrastructure (what with other tasks competing for attention) is another question, but, as an alternative to further unarchivings of the thread, at the point, if we really need a reminder, one could just post a new thread reminding of the issue with a link to the original thread in the archives. --Pi zero (talk) 13:17, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

For accredited reporters, reviewers and Admins..........

....wouldn't it be AWESOME if we did something like this?? http://about.poynter.org/about-us/faculty-staff ....... --Bddpaux (talk) 19:11, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

It would, of course, be voluntary, but I think it would (at least visually speaking) help legitamize us a bit more. --Bddpaux (talk) 19:12, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Hello, I agree. It'd be nice if something like this existed. --Steventrouble (talk) 21:12, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

• A rogues gallery? :P Yeah, why not. The credentials verification page could-well do with a serious makeover. But, it'll be easier if we clean out the seriously inactive accredited reporters first. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 08:44, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Audio???

I just sited audio added to an article I wrote. Was that OK for me to've done that? I was concerned it might be a COI, since I wrote the article. --Bddpaux (talk) 18:22, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

You weren't involved in producing the audio, presumably, so I see no difficulty in you being the one to check it. --Pi zero (talk) 18:31, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

I know I'm like a dog on a bone about this........

.....but, I sure wish we'd modify our 3/3 rule on breaking stories. I think 2 tightly written mini-paragraphs would be great (sometimes, at least!) The idea would be that another story (or stories even) would follow in short order, and then the first might later "collapse" into one of the bigger stories.....wouldn't that be a reasonable consideration, policy-wise?? --Bddpaux (talk) 21:53, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

• That requires people understand what breaking news is. And nine-times-out-of-ten, they don't. It isn't an excuse to not meet minimum requirements because a story is very new. It is only for a story—such as a disaster— where a lot of details will change, a lot of additional information will come to light, and it will expand substantially beyond the original content.

As-worded, I don't think I'm being uncharitable in highlighting that your request has the appearance of seeking to submit writing below the defined standard. Three paragraphs? Far from onerous, I think, when that could also be framed as "a dozen sentences". It is a disservice to our readers to provide less, and an encouragement to actively seek more information from other news sources. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)