Wikinews talk:Requested articles/Archive 1

Embedded comments not working?

It seems like embedded comments (i.e. comments within "<!-- --!>" tags) aren't working properly on this page. The comments don't appear, but neither does anything after them. As there are comments in the "request an article" template which is linked from the main page, this ought to be fixed soon. (I'd happily do so myself, but I need sleep!!!) --81.170.16.193 21:16, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

• This probs because it should be <!-- hidden text here --> with no second "!". Where exactly are these problems??--MarkTalk 21:19, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Don't worry. I have fixed it. —FellowWikiNews (W) (sign here!) 21:33, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Difference

What are the differences between Requested articles and Wikinews Shorts:Today? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 77.209.25.129 (talk • contribs) 21:50, 27 April 2007

as it stands, i feel this requested articles page is not well thought out. a requested articles page in which people who don't know anything about wikis can drop a lead wld be useful, but the way this is set up, anybody who uses this correctly can instead just go ahead and add pretty much the same thing to a Shorts. despite this, i don't think many requested articles have made it to publication, even as Shorts pieces (am i mistaken?) so i don't think it a good idea to continue it in its present form, especially with its promise that "another Wikinewsie will create your article for you". –Doldrums(talk) 16:28, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Man falls down Mine minimal gone by

why isnt this deleted? --U.S.A. GTA SYSTEM - (talk) 00:04, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I have created an archive for this page so we can archve old requests insted of deletig them --A101 - (talk) 20:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Auction question

is this really news just wondering? I guess it could be fincial news do you do that short of thing here? --72.73.74.205 15:26, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Requested Articles not being done and also a cleanup should be needed

I have just noticed not many requested articles have been worked on or done and their starting to pile up. cleanup is needed. --72.87.59.241 13:15, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

major revamping needed

for the ra's it could be cleaned up a little. just looks a little messy. and p.s. ra's have not been updated in awhile none of them have been started or answered. --Crogan (talk) 10:12, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

requested articles seem to be dead

no one answers them lol --72.73.72.122 17:01, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Most people just write something. I think its more so that people would start them and hope that someone would fix them and get them published. But there are a few users who do watch this page. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 17:02, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Nancy Reagan?

She is or out of the hospital right now with a broken pelvis more info on news sites. Just wanted to let you guys know of the importance of this article. thank you hopefully someone will have the time and add this article. --71.254.103.8 03:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

cleanup needed

for these requested articles. some just seem wrong. --72.73.92.244 15:47, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Tennis

No tennis news since September? Can anyone help? I am looking into, but I am a "news rookie". -- Mjquin id (talk) 22:02, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Time for a new cleanup?

I see that many of the requested entries have not been cleaned up in awhile. Some have been made into articles some have not maybe if a admin or someone can cleanup the old and bring in the new that would be great. Thank you. --Softmusik4lyf (talk) 16:26, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

old items-new items

someone should really clean out the old items if they get a chance some date back to febuary. just a heads up. --Mograil (talk) 01:45, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Done Thanks for pointing this out, I've archived the old requests. Tempodivalse [talk] 01:51, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

boise river rescue anyone up for creating this?

women were saved from drowning in the boise river. --72.73.69.10 (talk) 19:37, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Mostly Stale

most of the requested articles are stale they should be removed and look forward for new requests to come in. --72.73.99.144 (talk) 00:53, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

sources?

The guidelines say you need at least 2 sources, but the {{Request}} template only provides for one. I put the second source for my requested sports article in the edit summary. 71.178.188.48 (talk) 02:50, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

help

requested articles could use some help by more stories being made. just saying. thnx. Snaggletoothkhan (talk) 09:48, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Agreed. This project has been in a slow decline for a solid decade, unfortunately. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:51, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

We're all volunteers. Dumping three or four words isn't going to convince us to write something for you; you have to sell it. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 00:19, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

deaf mother car stolen after delievering pizzas

i added sources please try and publish. Baozon90 (talk) 22:29, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Is this still fresh? Baozon90 (talk) 10:12, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, no. It is not fresh. It happened Wednesday of last week. Even giving it an extra day because it happened in the evening, it is still too old. Thanks for the story idea, though. --SVTCobra 10:58, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

simone biles story

please create i added two sources. Baozon90 (talk) 21:49, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

my requests

idont seer a point in reqesteing anymore really because no one starts an article or anything. sorry byut my concerns. if i put two or more sources will ya help me out? Thhx Baozon90 (talk) 22:18, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

@Baozon90: The reality is, this project is very dormant. Wikinews is the least successful WMF project and it is very difficult to motivate users to write news here. I think this has value (I just wrote a story in the past week and I've done original reportage) but the way Wikinews works is just very different from the other WMF projects and is frankly not effective for its basic purpose of providing coverage to keep someone informed. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:27, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Koavf, Baozon90: Baozon's previous submission Norway's Warholm wins gold in 400 m hurdles at World Championships in Doha was published yesterday and their current submission, At least five killed after WWII-era plane crashes in Connecticut was just submitted for review. Justin, we have never achieved the desired breadth of coverage, but the project is hardly dormant, as you say. Baozon has given us very minimal information in their story requests (look at the history of the two previously mentioned articles), so for two of them to have gotten so far is pretty good, in my estimation. --SVTCobra 00:50, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: To be clear, I was talking about Wikinews generally compared to other WMF projects. Just comparing en.wn versus other English-language WMF projects, there were 157 edits and logged actions on en.wn on 2019-10-01. en.wp, en.wikt, commons, and data obviously had thousands of edits those days, so it wouldn't even be reasonable to compare (en.wikt has had well over 2,000 edits just today) and excluding meta and mediawiki, that leaves species (thousands), en.wb (285), en.wq (~2,000), en.wv (510), en.ws (~4,000), and en.voy (~1,000). With two exceptions, that's at least an order of magnitude greater and that is probably typical. Comparing statistics and just restricting ourselves to English-language projects, en.wb has 83,851 content pages, en.voy has 29,401, en.ws has 756,162, en.wikt has 6,128,854, en.wp has 5,941,289, en.wq has 35,038, en.wn has 21,707, and en.wv has 26,969. But for context, a project like a travel guide probably shouldn't realistically have more than maybe 250,000 pages anyway: en.voy is pretty generous about what counts as a "destination" but to give a useful travel guide to the world, you could definitely say that project is 10% of the way there. How many news stories could have been written in the past 15 years? It's mind-boggling. Between Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and Wikivoyage being far behind the other projects in terms of content and utility, Wikinews is last in virtually any metric I could imagine. Even some smaller projects like Wikivoyage could be constructive toward their stated aims: I could travel many places and find useful information on Wikivoyage. I could learn some skills and pick up a viable recipe or two on Wikibooks or Wikiversity. I am more-or-less likely to find useful quotations about a topic on Wikiquote. But Wikinews is not even close to being a general-interest news source that someone could read and even be broadly informed. And that's to say noting of the other language editions. There are 34 total (soon to be 33), with bg, hu, th, and sd all closed and only nine projects having 10,000 pages or more. Other than bot edits, editions like he, bs, ko, el, sv, fa, and ro haven't even had any edits at all in over a week and others like no and sq have had less than 10. The project with the most content is sr but that was a failed experiment in republication that has lead to it now having two actual edits in the past week. Even relatively active projects like pt only had one edit on 2019-10-01. zh has had one edit in the past five days while mammoth protests are happening in Hong Kong and the PRC had its 70th anniversary. All of ta's edits have been spam in the past week. Feel free to poke around at incubator:Incubator:Wikis#Wikinews but since only two projects have graduated in the last 8.5 years, it doesn't seem likely any others will join them soon. A reality-based assessment of Wikinews is that it is very grim and if any WMF project could be considered dormant or a failure, it's this one. Even in the case of Wikibooks, anyone can come along and build upon the existing content there, so the work done is additive but news ceases to be news after a certain period of time. You can't build upon Wikinews, you can only start again every day; even looking back, making a comprehensive or useful news archive is a far more challenging task. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:35, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Koavf: I am not going to argue with your statistics, but who are you helping by jumping in and telling new users don't bother it's a failed project? --SVTCobra 01:49, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: You may have missed where I wrote "I think this has value (I just wrote a story in the past week and I've done original reportage)". I didn't tell anyone "don't bother" nor did I say it's a "failed project": please don't misrepresent me. What I am trying to do is temper his expectations to be realistic: the vast majority of what gets posted here for requests never get written; he shouldn't take it personally and as an action item, he may want to do it himself, since we can't really rely on this request board. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:53, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Koavf: I'm sorry. Yes, I know you have had genuine positive interest in the project. But the way your initial response in this thread looked (at least to me), was not that the project had value, but the requests had value. Anyway, I am sorry if I offended you. For Baozon's part, they have stated it is difficult for them to write any more than they do, which appears to be very limited. --SVTCobra 02:07, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: Thanks for that--I'm not offended. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:37, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Koavf: Putting in my oar. I certainly consider you a "friendly" to this project. A few thoughts, in the interests of finding other ways to put things.

• Only mild doubts about the word "dormant", which is tolerable though I wish I could think of a slightly less passive term. (I feel there is a better word choice, if I could but find it).
• "least successful", besides coming out with a certain negativity, seems rooted in a supposition that success is measured entirely by producing as much per-diem activity as possible, which is surely part of it, but incomplete. Statistics tend to mislead. For example, en.wp teaches bad news habits (both writing and consuming); it'd be absurd to claim en.wp was unsuccessful because of that, and that points out there's no such thing as a single criterion for success that covers all projects. (Of course, since our plans for the future always do include increasing our output, that's a good reason to put our best foot forward.)
• the bit about "basic purpose of providing coverage to keep someone informed" sounds off, tbh. If you mean to suggest that our basic purpose is to give a reader everything they should know about what's happening in the world, well, no, that isn't our basic purpose. It isn't even our declared purpose. No citizen of the internet should get all their news from any one place. Learning to think in a fact-based rather than opinion-based way is imo crucial, and it's a strength for us and a weakness for en.wp.

--Pi zero (talk) 04:12, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Thanks and I appreciate what you and User:JackPotte and User:Dave Braunschweig (and others whom I don't remember now!) do to try to make en.wb, en.wn, and en.wv viable. I agree that Special:Statistics isn't the only measure and probably not even the primary one of the health of a project but I'm struggling to think of any metric where en.wn would come out ahead of almost any other sister in terms of well-being. The goal of en.wp isn't to be informed about the most up-to-date facts as such (tho that is definitely how it tends to play out) but I think a good common-sense metric would be to ask (e.g.), "If someone were looking for the definition of a word, would he find it (and an entry of some quality) on Wiktionary?" and the answer is generally "yes", particularly in certain languages. Similarly, if I were traveling to a destination and I checked Wikivoyage, would that travel guide give me some useful information about things to see and do while I'm there and some tips on what to do and not do--again, that is often yes, tho a lot of info is dated or vague but it still actually has some utility as a travel guide. For Wikinews or any general news source (i.e. not a narrow scope like an industry trade magazine or tabloid editorials masquerading as news), it's fair to ask, "Would someone reading this be informed about the world around him? Would he have some idea of what is going on in the world?" and if someone is reading Wikinews, the answer is no. E.g. we have four stories on the Hong Kong protests, most recently "Police shoot teenage protester as Hong Kong demonstrations continue", totaling about 1,300 words. I don't know that anyone is suggesting that Wikinews be the only source of news for someone but it can't be the primary one or even in the top 10. If you are going to argue that the real mission of Wikinews would be to encourage some kind of critical thinking about news and how we get facts to arrive to truth, etc. I think that is a very valuable goal but is actually an even higher bar to climb and so I don't think we're even close to that. I would be happy to be shown that en.wn is encouraging anyone to think in a more fact-based than opinion-based way but I don't see the evidence for that. (Similarly, a post at v:en:Wikiversity:Colloquim up now is about instructors actually using Wikiversity in a classroom setting--that would be great but it's very rare.) —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:21, 3 October 2019 (UTC)