User talk:Jockdoubleday

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 13:54, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

ICBP - International Conferences on the Bosnian Pyramids ‎

This looked encyclopedic. For a news article you want to start with a focal event — something specific that just happened in the past day or two. You'll then need two mutually independent trust-worthy sources corroborating the event, which you have to cite — we don't use footnotes — and write at least three paragraphs, with a lede at the top of an inverted pyramid. --Pi zero (talk) 18:46, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Jockdoubleday (talk) 18:57, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, it was only three months of work, so nema problema, as they say in Bosnia. This is my first time creating an article for WikiNews, and html is only slightly less dense than Greek to me, so we'll see where my ignorance and naivete lead. Or maybe we just have. Sincerely, Jock

Jockdoubleday (talk) 18:57, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Three months of work? I don't understand.

Wiki markup is basically easy, and for an ordinary Wikinews article you don't need any html. (The same isn't as true for a Wikipedia article: they use footnotes, which involve stuff that looks a lot like html.)

If you create an article using one of the article-creation forms scattered about the site —like the one on the {{Howdy}} template at the top of this page— it creates all the standard formatting elements of a Wikinews article for you. There's some stuff for the date at the top, which you just don't touch; when you save the page it'll turn into the right thing, as long as you don't touch it. Down at the bottom there are two source citations, just waiting for you to fill in the data; if you need more than two, just copy-and-paste to make more of them. You just write in the information for each field after the equals sign; like, if you write

*{{source|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4577142.stm 
|title=Las Vegas hosts digital nirvana 
|author=Alf Hermida 
|pub=BBC News Online
|date=January 3, 2006
}} 

you'd get something that looks like this:

• Alf Hermida. "Las Vegas hosts digital nirvana" — BBC News Online, January 3, 2006

For the body of the article you don't need anything but simple text; just put a blank line between paragraphs. There are a few other really simple things to do, but we can show you how to do those easily enough after you've submitted your first article — wikilinks, an infobox, categories, maybe a picture.

You may find WN:PILLARS and WN:WRITE helpful. --Pi zero (talk) 21:00, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

The work was getting the data together from articles in Bosnian and trying to find the titles of presentations that were not actually listed anywhere and the list goes on. Learning html was just the icing on a many-layered cake. There are many, many, many articles on how to do citations/sources/references/notes, and I read a lot of them before I decided to just do *something.* Anyway, I'll take your original advice and try to post on Wikipedia. Thanks, and have a nice day.

Jockdoubleday (talk) 21:14, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Ah. Yes, I'd think definitely Wikipedia is the place for that piece. I hope it works out for you there.

Wikinews writing is massively simpler than Wikipedia writing in some ways. One of those ways is, none of that super-complicated citation stuff. --Pi zero (talk) 21:38, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Yep, you seem to write intelligently...but we do news here....neutral and fresh is the way we like our stories. --Bddpaux (talk) 14:56, 11 May 2015 (UTC)