Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2014/August

Request for Autochecked?

Hi. Is there a page to add requests to become Autochecked? All my edits currently have to be checked by other users, which I think takes up their time unnecessarily, as I have a clean block log here, and am trusted on other projects (en.wp Sysop). Thanks, It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 14:58, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Well, in theory you'd request it at WN:RFP; but frankly, I don't think we want that here. Even the most trusted reviewers don't want their edits autochecked, because the review bit is a very big deal here (think global impact, with no exaggeration in the term). If there were a way to autocheck everywhere except in mainspace, I imagine we'd all go for it, because the review bit has a different meaning on the other spaces; but as long as autocheck includes mainspace, we'd want to limit it to very highly circumscribed cases (i.e., bots approved by the community — and we're pretty cautious about granting the bot flag). --Pi zero (talk) 15:16, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

We should probably mark Wikinews:Autochecked users as deprecated or historical or something similar. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:01, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Portals lead stories

Is there any limitations on updating the main stories which appear on Portals, or any guidelines on what these stories should be? Some of them are looking dated and I wished to check before just changing them. CSJJ104 (talk) 20:39, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

There's not a formal limitation to what you're wanting to do. I don't think anyone would mind if you do it. However, Portals seem to be deprecated in favour of Categories. --RockerballAustralia contribs 20:50, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I had noticed that several are linked to from the main page, or are in turn linked to from one that is, although often these ones do mot have story summaries such as Portal:United Kingdom. Should more effort be spent on ones linked from the main page, or at least a consistency established to what the new page links to (either portals or categories)? CSJJ104 (talk) 21:07, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I was noticing just a day or two ago that there are some portals linked from the main page, and I thought about what it would take to get rid of those links.

• Many of our categories, but not all, use {{topic cat}}, which makes for a pretty snazzy category page. Compare, for example, Category:India which uses {{topic cat}}, to Category:Russia which (at this moment) does not. One thing we'd certainly want to do, before retargeting the links from portals to categories, would be to convert all of those categories to use {{topic cat}}. I started doing that the other day.
• There is another difference between categories and portals. As it was explained to me long ago, the categories are meant to be used by researchers searching our archives, while the portals are meant for readers. I'm not sure I completely understand that distinction, but as a practical matter, most portals offer one thing not offered by {{topic cat}}: an article-creation form. I can appreciate the desirability of sending readers from the main page to a page that offers an article-creation form. So I'm not sure what to think about that.
• As a further plot twist, I hope soon to start seriously deploying the new generation of semi-automation I've been been developing for the project. This has two different possible implications for the portals. On one hand, I would expect to replace those article creation forms with a sophisticated interactive article wizard, accessed by a simple button that (unlike a big cumbersome article-creation form) could be conveniently added to {{topic cat}}. On the other hand, the main reason the portals fell out of use, so I gather, was that it was too much work to keep their leads up-to-date, and it's possible the new generation of semi-automation could provide a way to conveniently update portal leads.

--Pi zero (talk) 22:05, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I've now upgraded all the region categories to use {{topic cat}}. --Pi zero (talk) 12:36, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Would it be appropriate to update categories with {{topic cat}} in any categories I come across which don't already use it. Also, what, if any, are the criteria for creating a category? CSJJ104 (talk) 23:35, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

'In Depth' articles

Can anyone explain what is meant by in depth articles? I have seen the phrase in the Wikinews:Content_guide and in several article titles, but cannot find a policy describing what is meant by it.

Thanks to those who have answered my questions up to now, trying to understand how this wiki works. CSJJ104 (talk) 23:30, 22 August 2014 (UTC)