Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2012/October

Christmas stories?

Hello. I am primarily active, to the degree that I am active lately, over at the English wikipedia. I am one of the editors who works extensively with religion related content, including Christianity related content. I am proposing a contest there for the upcoming month about developing content related to the Advent/Christmas/New Years "holiday" season, and have indicated there that I think, possibly, that for some of the larger or more significant or unique celebrations of the season. I indicated in the comment that I thought it might be possible that this site might be able to use good articles on the holidays in various areas as well. I would welcome any comments from the regulars here at the thread in wikipedia where I have proposed the idea here, and would particularly welcome some input on ideas of specific articles which might be worthwhile having here, some that might not be so worthwhile, and so on. Thank you for your attention in this matter. John Carter (talk) 22:21, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

IRC Logging Policy

This is a proposal following a discussion by WMF ops yesterday about the potential to do an RfC on Meta to change the logging policy across WMF related channels. This proposal is for #wikinews ^{live connect}, #wikinews-en ^{live connect}, #wikinews-workshop ^{live connect}, #wikinews-tech ^{live connect}, #en.wikinews

Logging policy

1. Public logging for use on Wikinews and elsewhere is allowed for events like workshops conditional this being announced before the event and the topic in the room stating it is being logged during the workshop.
2. Wikinews logging is allowed for limited cases where the logging is used on article reviews, provided permission is given by parties to include log extracts on the review.
3. Wikinews logging is allowed for intervews in the room provided the reporter and the interview subject both consent.
4. Public logging on and off Wikinews is otherwise prohibited unless permission is given by all parties, and an administrator is informed this logging occurred.
5. Local policies for all other WMF projects are enforced; if journalism work is being done on other channels, users need clear permission to log for on Wikinews work.

Implementation

1. If a user IRC posts logs to Wikinews in violation of Logging Policy, the user can be blocked from Wikinews at administrator discretion.
2. If a user IRC posts logs to Wikinews in violation of Logging Policy, ops in Wikinews controlled chatrooms can block the user from all chatrooms at the ops discretion.

Caution

1. All users are cautioned that while these are policies in Wikinews, IRC users should have zero expectations of privacy. Wikinews administrators have limited control over IRC and can only enforce logging rules in a limited context.

This policy would be implemented by modifying Wikinews:Internet Relay Chat to include these guidelines.--LauraHale (talk) 20:12, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments

• My first impression of this, just looking it over somewhat quickly, is, it looks complicated. Wikinewsies tend to be allergic to red tape, despite some confused souls mistaking our review process for red tape. I'll have to give this more thought, to see whether the first impression holds up, and whether there's a way to simplify it without loss. --Pi zero (talk) 20:44, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Summing it up: Do not log without permission. Logging and public posting either on Wikinews or off Wikinews leads to potential block on #wikinews IRC channels or on Wikinews. That's the intent. If there is a global RfC, I'd like to have local consensus established through an RfC so outside RfC cannot superimpose over us. --LauraHale (talk) 21:05, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Now you mention it, I must look up and see what happened a while back when a Wikinewsie got in trouble for disruption on IRC. My vague (hence unreliable) memory is, there was much discussion about when it is, and isn't, appropriate for behavior on IRC to spill over on-wiki. --Pi zero (talk) 21:39, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
      • This incident? Or something more recent? I was partially thinking having it formalised, and possibly citing the need to protect source confidentially reporting wise, would also be good.--LauraHale (talk) 23:13, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

U.S Election

Hi, I just wanted to ask if there was some sort of plan for the U.S election to make sure we can get the results up as soon as possible. Is there a possibility for some sort of rapid editing policy to be in place so that whoever publishes the results(probably not me as they will be known in the middle of the night where I am) can have their article published as soon as possible? As obviously this is a huge story with great global interest.-- CalF (talk) 16:14, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikinews's niche in the journalistic world is providing high-quality review to anyone at all; we have various plans to improve our support for it, of course, but meanwhile we maintain the thing we want to improve. Just saying.

Getting something through the review process promptly is a matter of making arrangements to have someone available for review. For our big Paralympic coverage a couple of months ago, we had a number of reviewers making a big effort to keep up with the articles being submitted — half a dozen or more articles a day at the peak, and I admit I for one have been kind of slowly recovering from over-exerting myself at that time. We pushed ourselves hard for that; but... this gets into deep underpinnings of the project. Our synthesis can be very valuable, yes, but for best effect one wants to calculate it to play to our strengths. The Paralympics work was original reporting, which is highly prized on Wikinews. What are our best strengths for synthesis? Well,

Wikinews synthesis isn't at its best with huge stories, of the sort that all the major news outlets compete with each other to cover especially well. They have vast resources for such things, and in any case, our synthesis is by definition slower off the mark than its sources. One fundamental value of our synthesis is that it goes into our free permanent archive of snapshots-in-time that will never disappear behind a paywall — but our synthesis is at its best when covering things that haven't gotten enough mainstream coverage, or good enough mainstream coverage. (For example, this synthesis was, in the words of its successful featured article nomination, "the best English coverage [we] saw of what should have been a major international story.") --Pi zero (talk) 14:32, 30 October 2012 (UTC)