Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2018/January

Greek sports

I would like to cover the Greek sports news, and I'd want to know if anyone's interested in these news. Gmentis (talk) 19:51, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@Gmentis: We'd be happy to have Greek sports coverage. There are some basics you'll need to learn, to write articles that can pass our review process. You may find page WN:PILLARS helpful. There are also other pages that might help, such as WN:WRITE. And please feel free to ask us questions. --Pi zero (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

I have already written two stories, in an article style, as far as I am concerned. The one about Shojaei Masoud's loan to AEK (FORZA AEK!) and the one of Ehsan Hajsafi's transfer to Olympiacos. Gmentis (talk) 09:47, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

@Gmentis: We welcome contributors willing to learn. You have attempted several articles, but you clearly don't know the en.wn basics, and if your attitude is "my writing is valuable by definition, I don't need to learn anything", you won't learn anything because you won't try to. Assuming that anything you write should be published without vetting by others is blogging, and is not what en.wn is for. --Pi zero (talk) 14:18, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

@Gmentis: if you don’t submit those articles for review, they would be marked stale.
117.198.178.246 (talk) 15:21, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

How can I submit them? Gmentis (talk) 15:29, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

@Gmentis: There should be a button on the {{develop}} tag. If that doesn't work —and we want to know if it doesn't— there are instructions on the {{develop}} tag. --Pi zero (talk) 15:36, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to sort articles by date

Frankly, sorting articles in a category by title is virtually useless for news. Someone wanting to read about a topic doesn't want to see all of the stories about Venezuela arranged by whatever arbitrary name they are given but by when the event occurred. Sorting by date is possible without having to rename files (e.g. see how it works on the Marvel Wikia: http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Peter_Parker_(Earth-616)/Appearances ). Is there something I'm missing here or is this an obvious feature that we should have? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: If I follow you, you're asking about sorting articles in a category by the order in which they were added to that category. I don't think that would benefit us, for two reasons. In no particular order,

• We don't care about the order pages were added to a topic category, which might have nothing whatever to with the article's publication date (adding and occasionally modifying categories on archived articles is a relatively common form of archive curation).
• We primarily use DPLs, mainly consulting the list of pages in a category for mass brute-force searches that likely use string search and for which, if done visually, alphabetical order seems as good as any. (DPLs can be sorted by the date on which pages were added to some one of the categories required by the DPL, which we manage to make do with although even that isn't quite what we would ask for if we had both power and inclination to fiddle with specialized built-in features of the platform. I for one am not so inclined — I feel better when the Foundation isn't looking in our direction.)

--Pi zero (talk) 13:13, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Re: 1 I am suggesting sorting them by date written/published. Sorry if that's not clear but please see the link I provided: it sorts comic books from the 1960s thru today by the date those were published, not when pages were added to the wiki or last edited or something. Again, it seems just obvious to me that this is the best method for sorting news. Re: 2 The DPLs are fine and useful as they go but we have a larger archive than can be listed via an RSS-generated list. When we have dozens of articles or hundreds, they won't display on DPL. So they are both useful, just different. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:28, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: In fact, our DPLs can handle arbitrarily long lists, by scrolling down through them; the ability to do so is not inherent in DPLs, but is accomplished using the dialog tools. You can see this technique at work on most of our large topic categories (excepting old ones not yet upgraded to use {{topic cat}}). Even Category:Published provides a scrollable DPL.

Alphabetical order is desirable for some purposes, and the way to provide it is to leave the ordering as-is. --Pi zero (talk) 19:19, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

(Clariciation: javascript must be enabled, for the dialog tools to function.) --Pi zero (talk) 19:22, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: We may be talking past each other here. Of course, there is no reason in principle why an RSS-generated list has to end but in practice, no one wants to scroll thru 498 stories in a DPL list to find something. Again, pardon me if I'm being unclear here so please allow me to rein this proposal into a couple of questions: Yes or no: do you think that categorizing by date is probably the most intuitive or useful way of categorizing articles at a news site? Can you please explain to me examples where alphabetical ordering has some utility, particularly over chronological? I'm not being bull-headed here, I'm just not seeing it. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:36, 22 January 2018 (UTC)