User talk:Simon

Welcome

Simon, welcome to Wikinews! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

Our key policies - if you read anything, read these!

• Wikinews:Neutral point of view - tell every side to a story in a fair and balanced way
• Wikinews:Cite sources - everything in a Wikinews article must be sourced

Here a few pointers to help you get to know Wikinews:

• Wikinews:Introduction - overview of the site
• Wikinews:Writing an article - how to write and publish a complete article
• Wikinews:Content guide - what's suitable for Wikinews
• Wikinews:Style guide - how articles should look before publishing
• Wikinews:Contents - the contents page.

There are always things to do on Wikinews:

• Existing articles need expanding and checking for spelling and mistakes
• The front page lead articles often need updating
• Developing stories need finishing and publishing
• Discussions need your input
• Audio Wikinews could always use more contributors
• And of course, stories need writing!

By the way, you can sign your name on Talk pages using four tildes (~~~~), which produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, you can ask them at the water cooler or to anyone on the Welcommittee, or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! CGorman 21:10, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Science, technology and health content

I was just going through Recent Changes and spotted your user page edit. Im delighted to see a professional journalist interested in taking part in Wikinews! Its fantastic! Anyways you proably are aware of the Science and technology and Health pages. So if you happen to write any relevent articles, it would be a great help if you post them there when you publish your article. Feel free to make it a Major Story on these pages if you think it warrents such status or if the current leads are getting old.

If you are ever looking for a picture, pop over to Wikicommons and have a look around... althought it is hard to find exact photos (like a picture of a Cat-Scan machine, Nokia 3310, Dell Dimension XPS etc.) you will proably be able to get generally pictures (e.g. the UN flag for an african famine story; or a major landmark to indicate a city... like Conference on XYZ takes place in Paris).' You are particularly lucky, as you probably will write a few astronomy articles; many of NASA's pictures are copyright free so you can load them onto Wikicommons and use them in your articles.

I notice you are use to working with online media, so I presume you will get use to wiki tags quite quickly, so heres a few useful ones:

• {{Date|Todays date}} - used at top of article, writen in form of February 25, 2005.
• {{source|url= | title= | author= |pub= |date=}} - added for sources, just fill in the gaps (the author is not compulsory, most major online sources such as the BBC don't tell you who wrote what.)
• [[w:Sample Article|Sample Article - to link to wikipedia just add a w:.
• [[Image:Sample Image 647|thumb|right|200px|President X said this today]] - adding an image is fairly straight forward.

Anyways, if you ever need help with anything, just ask and i'll try to help; im on the Welcommitte and Im the newest Administrater. Good luck - and welcome to wikinews! CGorman 20:45, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)