User:Gryllida/How Wikinews can be used at a High School

This is an essay by one or more individuals on using and contributing to Wikinews. It contains their advice or opinions, not necessarily those of the Wikinews community. Community essays can be found here; links to official policies can be found in the Wikinews introduction.

This is an user essay, suggested by its author(s). It's not a community essay, nor a policy or guideline.

Key concepts:

• Wikinews is a sister project of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia anyone can edit; Wikinews is free news anyone can write.
• The mission is to present news with minimal bias. Opinion pieces are offtopic. Articles need to present the news as neutrally as possible.
• Wikinews is written by volunteers. Readers and visits count is pleasant to check, but increasing it is not mission critical. We do not select news based on popularity; rather, each contributor writes about what is relevant to them, or to their local area or the world. Wikinews is not for sale.
• At Wikinews, 'News' is limited to something that happened today or yesterday.
• Peer review is required. This ensures compliance with the style guide and content guide. (More introduction is at PILLARS.)
• Authors are expected to read feedback from the reviewer, and act on it as soon as possible.
• First attempts will likely face difficulties, and require commitment to fast thorough work. News gets old quickly.
• If a news article gets old, it is no longer publishable. It is marked as {{stale}}, and typically is impossible or highly difficult to resume work on. In most cases, the correct response to your article becoming old or stale is writing another news story about another event.
• Just like Wikipedia, Wikinews is not censored. This means that various, sometimes mildly disturbing, topics can be seen in the published news section and especially in the drafts section of the site (this is the newsroom). Note that off-topic spam sometimes occurs but is usually promptly removed by volunteers.
• Writing a news article every 2–3 days can be a good reading and writing exercise. It may help the author(s) improve their English reading and writing skills, and their vocabulary.
• This website software has facilities to track the progress of each student and each class. This means the teacher can see what news each of their students has written and published.
• This was done before at university level, e.g. in 2011 (and was done every year, until about 2–3 years ago).
• At High School level perhaps group assignment is a possibility. However, care will need to be taken to allocate responsibilities. Multiple author writing was attempted previously, with success highly dependent on the ability of one of the authors — a 'leading' author — to ensure the article flows smoothly.
• Related publication: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/428/ Wikinews - a safe haven for learning journalism, free of the usual suspects of spin and commercial agendas.
• Later down the track, more successful students can do original reporting. This is part of citizen journalism.
• Review load is currently low. If this project were to proceed in a classroom, the first trial class size would need to be very small, to ensure that review is not delayed and the class is able to progress. It is hoped that some of the students might eventually become reviewers to assist with reviews for the students who start next semester.

What's in it for the teachers:

• Students improve their reading and writing skills.
• Students improve their critical thinking.
• Peer reviewers at Wikinews may share some of the burden of checking homework.
• Students interact safely and transparently, as any contributions made by a user (at a news draft, in a discussion, or elsewhere) are publicly viewable by anyone.

What's in it for the students:

• The same improvement in English and critical thinking. May lead to improved grades in English classes or exams.
• Homework becomes more 'real', with texts applying to current events rather than abstract scenarios.
• Ability to progress to reviewer — a volunteer commitment that brings in another set of skills:

• communication with authors,
• collaborative team work in limited time (this time not with the reviewer but it can often be with new people),
• commitment to impartial work without giving in to conflict of interest or controversial submissions

and may increase the students' employability after finishing High School.

• For a new reviewer, a lighter version of reviewing, the 'welcome a bit' programme, is available to help build the necessary skills without commitment to reviewing a complete article, and
• for newly approved reviewers (this approval happens through a community vote), a volunteer Mentor can be added to help at initial stages of their reviewing work.

Help is available on wiki via water cooler (this is a forum) or live chat.