User talk:ThurnerRupert

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Mikemoral♪♫ 08:40, 14 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Contributing[edit]

Hi. In regard to your recent page creations here: Wikinews is not a blog. If you wish to contribute, I recommend starting with WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing, which is a compact overview of what we do here. Then, WN:Writing an article is a good tutorial on writing your first article here. --Pi zero (talk) 11:15, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Disruption[edit]

You're treating en.wn as if it were a blog. If you wish to contribute constructively, I've provided you with links to pages about what that means and how to do it. Spamming blog material here is disruptive. --Pi zero (talk) 13:29, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Btw, we frown on creating article categories that don't have preexisting published articles to go in them; once upon a time five or six published articles were wanted, nowadays it'd gotten down to three but wouldn't go further than that unless some additional principles were adopted to keep things from getting out of hand. There aren't any published articles related to the Wikimedia blog, nor are there likely to be any time soon. --Pi zero (talk) 13:37, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
the goal is disruption, yes. disruption of the negative trend wikinews is in: https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikinews/EN/SummaryEN.htm. 6 (SIX) editors, out of 1'500'000'000 speakers worldwide. it seems not right. therefor the discussion in NPOV. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 14:23, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a deliberate misunderstanding of my warning. I was talking about disruption of the project, i.e., harmful edits.

I'm honestly having trouble figuring out whether you're trying to help. I'd like to think so; I have this strong aversion to thinking ill of people, which has gotten me in trouble in the past. People have sometimes gulled me into wasting huge amounts of time and effort tyring to explain thins that they were determined not to understand, as their only interest in anything I might say about the project was in how to use it to invent new excuses for attacks the project (there's a word for that). When I came to Wikinews, I started by assuming nothing I thought I knew about wikis would apply, and began to try to learn how this place works (the same approach I'd successfully used on Wikipedia and then on Wikibooks). As I got the feel for it, I figured I could help by learning the dynamics of the place and finding ways to improve them. Well, I did that, and I've devoted myself for about four years now to bringing about what's needed. (Unsurprisingly, what's needed for Wikinews is also needed for all the other sisters.) You can't usefully help with Wikinews if you don't know what Wikinews is about, and whether it's possible to learn what Wikinews is about depends on not bringing wrong assumptions to the table. I can't figure out how invested you are in prior misapprehensions about Wikinews. (If you've got your knowledge of Wikinews from places like Signpost or the Wikimedia blog, you've likely got an awful pile of misapprehensions to let go of.) --Pi zero (talk) 15:10, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i am a number crunching and technical person. 6 editors on en.wn is a shame, even 600 would be a shame, something must be wrong. i have no idea what it is. i guess you have no idea as well, otherwise you might have fixed it long time ago. to figure out i try to put what i want to read just like i did with wikipedia. you see my contribution ratio over there, it is 75% article space or more, i am rarely involved in any meta wikiverse discussion. i would love to have you as a supporter, who helps to correctly categorize and rate my contributions. and occasionally tells me that this would be better placed on wikpedia or wikisource. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 16:12, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I do have some pretty clear insights into the causes of low activity on en.wn. I figured out most of it years ago, and I have some pretty specific ideas on what to do about it. But knowing what the problem is, and even knowing how it might be fixed, does not mean one can instantly fix it. Some solutions take a long time to implement. This one has, in fact, a huge technical element that I've been pouring labor into for about four years. If you're a technical person, perhaps you'd find some of the links at User:Pi zero/essays/vision/sisters#Implementation of interest. --Pi zero (talk) 16:29, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
i looked at the technical pages - and see that you want to help automate tasks, or create wizards for things. but i do not understand you correctly that a wizard should solve the problem? --ThurnerRupert (talk) 18:16, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't want to automate tasks. I want to semi-automate them, that is, use technology to help empower human beings without taking power away from them. To me, the point of wikis is to give the general population of human beings control over information instead of taking it away from them.

No, I'm not saying that a wizard would solve the problem. I'm saying that tasks (plural) on-wiki need to be easier, and there also needs to be better institutional memory of how to do them, and the way to make those things happen is to empower ordinary wiki users to grow wizards (and wizard-like things) just as they grow the primary output content of the wiki. My low-level tools are the starting point for that empowerment. It doesn't stop there, by any means; one then has to learn effective idioms for using the low-level tools. And there are a variety of tasks on Wikinews, or any other wiki, that then benefit as this empowerment is exercised. The dynamic equation of Wikinews has a bunch of parameters in it that could be tweaked by some semi-automated assistance; and it's striking to me that Wikinews output has been dropping slowly since the project was started — it hasn't dropped like a stone, it's coasted downhill, which suggests to me that the equation isn't really very far out of whack. So tweaking a bunch of those parameters may produce positive growth, if one has the ability and patience to walk that road. And if those tweaks aren't enough, frankly they're needed before any other measures can work, and probably one would need to do these things before one could work out what additional measures to take next. --Pi zero (talk) 19:13, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Talk/collaboration page[edit]

Hi. Thanks for the remark about the Obama article (which I'm starting to review now). I'm generally inclined to agree, though actually translating that into a reviewer (or admin) action will take a bit of effort. A technical point: each article page has two other pages associated with it, called "collaboration" and "opinions" on the control bar (although internally they're "talk" and "comments"). Your remark about the suitability of the article for publication is a collaboration thing, so should go on the collaboration page. We don't allow the opinions page to be created until (and unless) the article is published. (I would move your thread to the talk page, but the software makes it remarkably hard to do that; such things usually aren't as impossible with LQT as Flow makes them, but still awkward.) Btw: the name "collaboration"? Obviously gives more of a hint about what to put where than "talk", but has never fully caught on in conversation; we usually end up calling it "talk" because the word is so much shorter than "collaboration". --Pi zero (talk) 16:49, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for any confusion. I decided before submitting my review I should get that comment straightened out... which hasn't quite worked right afaict... --Pi zero (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
oh, now i see what you mean. you try to replicate what traditional publishing systems have, or what is conserved in systems like wordpress, typo3, etc. traditional publishing systems tend to have a business process attached to them, not even built into software all the time. this may vary for the piece of work published, be it a book, or a newspaper article. the typical driving force behind the process is the effort necessary to fix if it goes wrong. fixing a printed book is very hard. for a printed newspaper its easier, you can put up a correction next day. electronic it is again easier, just change. but, traceability is something one usually wants to have. the challenge is similar in software development. there was some publishing process as well. but, over time this got more agile, and the software to support changed. version control systems were invented to collaboratively work on source code, and trace it. see mediawiki source code as an example. there is a history, labels, contributors, difference. there are three types of labels: branches (move with a new contribution), tags (nailed town to a revicsion, do not move). the wiki way tries to replicate this model for other pieces than software source plus it attaches a html view onto it. it lacks "tags" or "labels" (excpet a handicapped implementation called "flagged revision"). a version in mediawiki does not store its predecessor, and therefor does not have branches as well. but the basics are there: a history, view the difference, attach a comment to a change, and refer to a specific version via a link at all times. for wikis the collaborative space therefor is the article itself. for source code review software does exist. this allows to attach text to source code revisions. talk pages try to replicate this functionality. again, not perfect, as the text is not attached to a specific version but in general. if you want to emulate a publishing process with such a system you would need a label, and a talk page for a version. what you try to do is quite awkward from a technical staandpoint: you try to freeze an article instead of giving it a label. you try to work around the talk page for all revisions by creating two talk pages, one for "published" and one for the revisions before.

the problem is now a clash between more traditional persons who follow processes, respect hierarchies, and ones who do not, and the software they use. the respective english article about Millennials (generation Y) fails to even mention this key change concerning "process" and "hierarchy". --ThurnerRupert (talk) 17:37, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some years back I happened (on satellite TV) across a discussion forum on an academic TV station from... I wish I remembered which western-US university; they'd gotten together a panel of three gen-Y rising stars in journalism, and asked them about the future of journalism. They all said pretty much the same thing, in different ways: there's oceans of information out there, the problem is to pair up information with the (earned!) trustworthiness of the journalist. That's one facet of what Wikinews is about. The essence of our approach is to let anyone at all submit articles, and require that before publication they must be thoroughly reviewed by someone who has been authorized as a reviewer by the Wikinews community. It may sound like a big drag on the workflow but, as I recall, the historical downward trend in Wikinews output shows barely a blip at the point where our review process was instituted. --Pi zero (talk) 18:09, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

raphael honigstein and outreach blog on wikinews?[edit]

User:Foxj publishes news about wikipedia on the wikimedia blog. on facebook he mentioned as it had "news" in the title, and my mobile opens the wikimedia blog 20 times slower than wikinews i was wondering why joe publishes there and not on wikinews. are there any policies which prevent personal opinions beeing here? would it be allowed that e.g. raphael honigstein would write one of this blog posts here? there are others which fall into a similar category just to name two: outreach: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/, signpost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost. what i found frightening that a wikipedia editor for 10 years, with a degree in journalism, says "I simply cannot get my head around its attitude to news coverage." (i hope foxj you allow to cite you like this). as main hindrance i see the NPOV policy, which is derived from a mail by jimbo concerning an ecyclopaedia/wikipedia. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 18:29, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, our neutrality policy prohibits publishing opinion pieces. See also WN:PILLARS. --Pi zero (talk) 18:42, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i wrote to wikimedia-l, as somebody invented that an email of jimbo concerning an encyclopaedia might serve as guideline for wikinews. if the wikinews community thinks it should produce wikipedia with its pillars "sourced" and "neutral", then personally i find better to split wikinews off onto a different infrastructure and let it compete with wikipedia. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 19:52, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't sound like you understand Wikinews. --Pi zero (talk) 20:09, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I should probably warn you, if you want insight into Wikinews, Jimbo honestly isn't the person to ask. --Pi zero (talk) 20:17, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

what am i missing? i was pointed at the stats, 6 active editors, 2 very active, 1 new article per day. your pillars will soon carry nothing i guess. no point of view :) --ThurnerRupert (talk) 23:03, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What are you missing? Some guesses, to start with: What Wikinews is. What Wikipedia isn't. Quite possibly, what news is. --Pi zero (talk) 23:32, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Can you elaborate please? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ThurnerRupert (talkcontribs) 15:04, 23 April 2016‎

I'll try, such as I can; apologies if it's delayed, as atm we've a lot of demand for review due to a university journalism class (cf. [1]). --Pi zero (talk) 15:46, 23 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
On reflection, this is getting badly off-topic. The difference between Wikinews and Wikipedia, the nature of news and how it relates to journalism, to wikis, and to the intersection of the two, is deep stuff but I don't see it belongs on this talk page. It has been remarked before that this policy page expresses itself very poorly; I mean, I figured it out eventually, but it sure does deemphasize the important stuff. It's much easier to learn about en.wn NPOV from other pages, such as WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing, WN:Attribution, and the like, or just by osmosis. (I've been meaning to write something on the subject for ages, but who has time? As has been pointed out, it's par for the course for small news orgs to have poorly-documented practices for pretty much that reason.) --Pi zero (talk) 12:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

on facebook the discussion evolved further into "wikinews is a failed project", "wikinews is dead", "do not invest a single cent in its further existence", "it has a hostile environment", up to "what would be the procedure to shut it down". personally i have no opinion about it. i like the technic, and the speed, compared to other means of publishing things in the wikiverse. to verify i tried now to copy a CC piece into “Dare to be different, yet hold your head high”: the impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia which has no other place on wikimedia servers. compare to Musician Prince dies aged 57, which easily can be incorporated into Prince (Musician). i looked at reputed news pages like guardian, bbc. they all have weblogs and personal opinions. i take this as strong indication that wikinews will only survive if it adjusts to a modern style news service. the rules would need to be adjusted to make the borderline between wikipedia and wikinews crystal clear. wikipedia is cited, npov. wikinews is original and via this is automatically pov. such articles need to be posted immediately, and can evolve. quality tags are assigned over the lifetime. an article can be optionally reviewed. it can get a npov tag, but has not in the beginning. it can be corrected just like real live blog posts or news articles. it can be collected in some bundle like "signpost". via this wikinews has the potential to evolve into a technical tool to produce news. the category system is crucial for this. imo the only way to let it survive. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 12:28, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

We've been getting flak from a hostile subculture of Wikipedia for a good deal longer than I've been here. A prominent Wikipedian (and, last I knew, influential figure on Signpost) came here a while back, freely admitted to be here purely to troll, and casually invited a Wikinewsie to commit suicide (I'd have blocked them on the spot, myself). I spent years looking for some flaw in the way Wikinews was explained that would account for misunderstandings by some Wikipedians (though by no means all; a lot of veteran Wikinewsies started on Wikipedia and some still contribute there). Eventually I realized it wasn't us, it was them. You can't reason with someone who doesn't care about facts; it's a complete waste of time (which is why it's so fruitless to try to reason with many extreme US Republican politicians; that's mostly a digression, although it does show that the problem is very widespread and directly damaging to society). One notable difference between the Wikipedian community and the Wikinews community is that we don't have that toxic social atmosphere that's accumulated over there; I remember when I started out on Wikipedia it was a really pleasant place to work. Here, things are usually pleasant, but are apt to turn sour if someone imports the atmosphere from Wikipedia; there's a nasty sort who come over here from there from time to time, bringing hostile atmosphere with them, and then go back to Wikipedia claiming that the atmosphere here is hostile. I could weep for Wikipedia; there are obviously still lots more good folks than bad there, or it would have collapsed already, but they do have a serious and accumulating problem, and if I knew a way to help, I would. --Pi zero (talk) 13:24, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

haha, lets not get off-topic. what to do to get the number of contributors is rising, up to, lets say, it is 4 digit. just to compare, english wikipedia has 27'000 editors, 3'000 very active. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 14:17, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What do you imagine the topic is? This is the talk page of the badly written NPOV policy page. --Pi zero (talk) 15:06, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

the topic is: NOPV and 2 pillars (neutral, sourced) needs to go away to let wikinews live. but i hoped that you have proposals how to change, coming from a journalism institution, knowing the bbc and guardian websites. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 15:22, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That's not a topic, that's a claim. Specifically, it's either a deeply misguided claim or or a deliberately malicious one; I'm inclined to the former, though I acknowledge the possibility of the latter. Wikinews stands (amongst other things) for the importance of a fact-based approach to reality, where opinions are based on learning facts, rather than "facts" being invented based on opinions. Tbh, you're showing strong signs of an opinion-based approach.

I'm having a delayed revulsion reaction to someone who would respond to hearing that someone invited someone else to commit suicide with "haha". That does tilt me a bit toward the malice/troll hypothesis. --Pi zero (talk) 15:47, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

correct, the topic of this discussion is a claim. the claim that contribution would go up if the contribution policy changes. the claim says: express your opinion with a category, not by restricting the contents e.g. "factual article", "opinion", "blog". as i know it is a claim, i asked what you would propse to get the contributions to rise. i contribute mainly to wikipedia with >75% article space edits and do not have a blog, which is pretty far from opinion-based. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 16:46, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, abandoning our standards would make our output worthless, and would trash a reputation we've earned over many years. There was, in fact, a split of the en.wn community some years ago; the hard-news folks stayed, the ones who wanted to lower standards created a "fork". Their approach failed, we're still here. Broadly, I'd say, both sides of the fork believed that the difficulty of writing and reviewing have a depressive effect on Wikinews; disagreement was over what to do about it. The alternative to betraying our journalistic principles is to provide support for living up to them, and that's what I'm working on; but that is then really not a topic for this talk page, and I've remarked on it on your user talk. --Pi zero (talk) 17:09, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i am lost in two discussion threads now, the one here, the one on the talk page, and i am not particularly good at it, not enough structure for a techie like me :) npov is a label in the modern times. not a standard. following the analogy to software sytems i drew on my talk page. i did not say "lower the standard what you consider news". i was advocating for considering generation y type wish to get rid of process and hierarchy, and replace it with labels and guidance. just as source code control systems do. i hope i am not talking too abstract now *blush* --ThurnerRupert (talk) 17:56, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikinews is a meritocracy. Our process involves acknowledging that some individuals have earned the right to be considered more trusted than others. (See WN:Never assume.) I suppose one could call that arrangement of more trusted individuals a hierarchy, in which case you'd have a process that calls for a hierarchy. Although the word "overthinking" comes to mind. :-)  There are certainly some folks, who may or may not be millennials, who perceive a meritocracy as "authoritarianism" (although such folk generally have no problem with being in authority, just with being expected to earn it first). --Pi zero (talk) 18:27, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm getting a bit tangled up, there, myself. News is vetted before publication; that's a defining characteristic of it, and you can't get that without some kind of process. Guidance is something wikis are not good at because, historically, they've only been geared to support writing passive hypertext documents, and frankly an instruction manual is not a particularly effective way to provide guidance on wiki. Interactive pages, which I mean to provide, should (to my thinking) be able to provide much more effective guidance. --Pi zero (talk) 18:34, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i think you got the point. you need to somehow find a way to adjust your process to this millenium, i.e. to software which publishes immediately, has labels (categories), can link to older revisions. you can have a label "blog", "opinion". you can have a label "news" as well, which fulfills whatever you define before. "published" would _not_ be a category any more, but stays for old articles. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 20:28, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No, that's not it. You literally can't do instant publication on a news site. That's not news. And news is important. Losing track of the need for verification and neutrality — that is one of the greatest evils in our world today (not that we invented it). Millions of people die from losing track of those things. --Pi zero (talk) 20:44, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(Yeah, can't do instant publication on an open news site.) --Pi zero (talk) 22:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

according to your standards, what categories a text like “Dare to be different, yet hold your head high”: the impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia would you give? blog? opinion? then we walk trough a generation Y publishing process by example. because the text is published. 2 times, on the blog, and wikinews. in the sense of public available. but it has no expert rating. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 06:01, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That item has not been published on Wikinews. You can tell because it hasn't been listed on the main page or any of the other DPLs for published articles around the site. We have technical measures in place to ensure that publication does not happen without authorization. When something is published on English Wikinews, it goes out on the google news aggregator as news content (not as blog content).

I've heard the stuff before, of course, about how gen-Y is very self-absorbed, with an unusually high incidence of narcissism, they think differently, etc. etc. I've observed, informally, that these claims seem to have some basis in reality. However, I find millennials aren't all a bunch of moronic spoiled brats; not all fit a given profile, and plenty of them are, even if a bit self-absorbed, also intelligent and civic-minded enough to see that journalism involves some special skill, grok the concept of a meritocracy, and want to help. Empower them to help, and there will be plenty of them who will do so. If those are still only a relatively small fraction of the number of users on the internet, well, the same is true of contributors to Wikipedia, and tapping into an even bigger pool of potential contributors can wait; I'm reminded of a Libertarian candidate for US president a few years back who, when asked how far he would take his agenda to shrink the federal government, said something like, once we have the federal budget down to less than a hundred billion dollars a year I'll rent out the superdome for a year and we can all get together and discuss what we want to do next. --Pi zero (talk) 12:26, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

do you feel that you answered my question now? i am not able to decipher your text to extract an answer fitting to what i believe is a simple question :( --ThurnerRupert (talk) 18:07, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Afaics, your previous remark was not a "simple question"; it was loaded with unsound assertions and assumptions. You asserted, falsely, that the item has been published on Wikinews; and you seem to have assumed, also mistakenly, that there is some need for Wikinews to abandon its principles in order to coddle millennials (to be blunt). Rather that ignore those dangerous biases, or deny them without explanation, I chose to explain why they are mistaken. If there was also a simple question in your remark, please re-ask it independent of those things. --Pi zero (talk) 18:52, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pi zero, the question is the one with the question mark at the end: according to your standards, what categories a text like “Dare to be different, yet hold your head high”: the impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia would you give? --ThurnerRupert (talk) 02:42, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]


This thread (primarily about understanding Wikinews and suitability of particular articles) has been moved to User_talk:ThurnerRupert#raphael honigstein and outreach blog on wikinews?. --Pi zero (talk) 12:09, 30 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

this thread claims that the wikinews (en.wn) policies, especially NPOV have a devastating effect on the edit count, 6 active editors, 2 very active, 1 new article per day. it is a try to convince the one and only user of wikinews, Pi zero, to drop the NPOV policy and with it 2 pillars, neutral and sourced, and replace it with a rating system. the difference is essential: against policy articles are deleted. articles not neutral or sourced can be rated so, but stay on the wiki. the goal is to be clear what can go on en.wn, and not on another wikimedia project. npov and new can go on wikipedia, sourced can go on wikipedia and wikisource. non neutral, opinion pieces can go nowhere, original research can go here but the criteria is extremely high and the process attached to it not adjusted to 21 century software technology. currently en.wn is kept afloat as it is used as university tutorial. this paper from 2012, from a study 2011, announces "Wikinews - a safe haven for learning journalism, free of the usual suspects of spin and commercial agendas". by David Blackall, University of Wollongong, Leigh T. Blackall, Charles Darwin University, Brian Mcneil. i tried to find 2016 classes, but could not. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 07:12, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I get the impression you've been preconditioned by others (there are some usual suspects, with whom we're familiar here). The whole position relies on adopting purely Wikipedian objectives/measures/etc. across the board, although for at least some of the individuals involved that adoption is a way to justify the position rather than a motive for the position. In my experience there's no hope of untangling all the Wikipedian misconceptions one-at-a-time. Or at least I've yet to figure out a way to do so. When I arrived at Wikinews I deliberately started with the default position that nothing I'd learned about wikis from Wikipedia or Wikibooks (and I'd learned a bunch by then) should be expected to apply to Wikinews; I'd had plenty of practice with that because I'd done the same thing when I arrived on Wikibooks, and the same thing before that when I arrived on Wikipedia. --Pi zero (talk) 12:50, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
[Argh; that got just slightly garbled in the writing; I started to say something and then gave up on it, and didn't fully remove it; removed now. --Pi zero (talk) 12:53, 1 May 2016 (UTC)][reply]

to tell me that i am preconditioned is a huge insult. this would mean i am not able to use my brain. the only person i am preconditioned now is by you. i spent hours discussion with you. my final conclusion is: we have a generation conflict here. you think in terms of a traditional publishing process, where publish is a label an expert gives. something which does not get this label is to be deleted. i think that publish means "public access" which is immediate after save, and think that a big bunch of non-expert persons are able to create contents as long as the policy is good (i.e. what goes on the site and what not). you tell me i do not understand news and wikinews, and i respond that modern news sites do have opinion pieces and blogs (cf bbc, guardian). to me the only relevant criteria is a countable number of regular contributors and contributions. for you contributions are only marginary important, contributors even less. you claim putting more work into the software and templates will fix the contributions rate, while i think you had 12 years to show it - and it did not work out. i think that contribution follows need / policy, and am claim that piloting it we could prove that a policy change would attract many users. you to the contrary fear that the quality will suffer, just like the oxford dictionary argued when wikipedia was new. to me it is important to bundle technical resources and make everybody in the wikiverse use its own software (eat your own dogfood ...) even for blogs and translations, while you do not care about this as your focus is wikinews only. i am always open to new technologies, new processes, new kind of contents, while you go down a traditionalist path and see danger in everything which you are not able to put in some context. i think the articles on wikinews are of exceptionally bad quality and very shallow, just copy in what is there on the internet, while you think they are good and putting work in will make them better - ignoring that people tend to walk away. so we have a differing opinion. which is fine. if somebody asks me today, i would vote for (1) remove Pi zero as bureaucrat and administrator and (2) set wikinews read only. if you need a personal playground to teach journalism, you might consider wikiversity. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 14:49, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I entered into this discussion in good faith. I've devoted massive amounts of time to trying to be helpful to you. I've gradually concluded this was probably a doomed attempt from the start. I disagree, btw, that the gap is generational. In any case, your portrayal of my beliefs is false. If you wish to convince me that you're not a troll, feel free, but be warned that false ascriptions to me will not help your case. --Pi zero (talk) 15:13, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

what you are doing does not scale. a little discussion is for you "massive". you entered into this discussion like hundred others of this kind: to teach me about your attitude. the result is the same as with all others: i think now "no, your attitude is not for this millenium". you are not prepared one second to rethink yourself, to rethink / reinvent wikinews. you think one contributor is enough. and i say we need a thousand minimum. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 08:47, 5 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]


You've asked to have this kept on this page on the grounds that it's about NPOV. I see no evidence you've attempted to understand our approach to neutrality, nor really to understand this project. Your comments suggest a consistent assuming of things based on personal biases you'd settled on before you arrived, with no inclination to check facts; almost incidentally your assumptions evidently include assuming you are better qualified for running a wiki news site than those who have been doing it for years. In an earlier post I objected to your fabrications about what you claimed to be my beliefs, but truthfully if I'd been willing to expend waste a lot of time on it there were other fact-check-less misrepresentations in what you'd said. By whatever path, you've got yourself into an opinion-based (as opposed to fact-based) mindset. I have a rule of thumb, that when someone starts posting paragraphs that contain so many misrepresentations of fact it'd take several times as much space (and lots and lots of time) just to describe them all, that's not someone it'd be a good use of one's time to try to have a rational discussion with. I conclude you are in that awkward category whose intentions are unclear but whose actual behavior is effectively trolling. --Pi zero (talk) 12:09, 5 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pi zero, the question is simple and still not answered: how to get the NPOV policy removed? i am opposing your approach to neutrality, yes. today, not 5 years ago. because the contribution rate went down to nearly zero, now, not 5 years ago. contrary to what you state here, i did _not_ say you are not allowed to continue what you are doing on wikinews. you continue as ever. one exception: do not delete an article for POV, but assign a category. for traditional news which follow your process, you assign "news" instead of "published". this si a simple effortless measure to mark the same quality contents, but attract additional content and persons. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 15:36, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

First, let me be perfectly clear about this: this thread does not belong on the talk page of NPOV. It serves no purpose there. The idea of getting rid of the policy, if taken seriously, would not belong on that page either. (This is the first of several things I'm pretty sure you aren't going to want to hear, but you pinged me; I was going to let this lie since replying to you has consistently accomplished nothing.)
It has taken me some time to develop a plausible theory of where you are coming from on this (because I am actually not inclined to the bad-faith theory in your case). I have observed that you get facts wrong regularly, including facts about what I have said. So now I have a working theory: you're not good with facts, and this leads you to not understand or appreciate a sister project that focuses intensively on being factual. And you want to destroy that project — not that you want to be destructive, but that you're unable to appreciate the destruction involved — in order to make it a place where someone like you can operate. The fact is, though (following this hypothesis), that you simply don't belong on a news site. You don't have the aptitude. I've seen individuals before who, for one reason or another, were not a good fit on some sisters. One individual in particular that I recall had come here after they'd made a real try on Wikipedia and things did not work out for them there at all; they came here, and though things were a bit rocky they, and we, tried to make things work but eventually it came unraveled and they moved on. I gather they found a home on (in their case) Wikisource, which for whatever reason was, last I heard, working out nicely for them, a good match for them. Some people fit better on some projects than others.
The stuff about millennials has also taken me a long time (years, in this case) to think though. There was always something odd about it, but our conversation here has pushed me to pin down the oddness. Young people in every generation tend to go through a phase of rebelling against authority; some individuals more than others, obviously. Most, but again not all, of them grow out of some of that as they get older, again varying between individuals. (Churchill iirc claimed that any man who is not a liberal when young has no heart, any man who is not a conservative when old has no head.) The millennial generation seems different in two respects: one, the statistical distribution of this rebellion of youth is somewhat skewed from typical generations, which is really not a very big deal, but may well be due in part to odd inter-generational dynamics caused partly by the recent rate of technological change; and two, the fact that they have been repeatedly told that there's something fundamentally different about the way they process information. For those individuals who have trouble learning to process information, being told that there's something fundamentally different about how they do so gives them an excuse to not try to learn, which is sad and may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But no, the millennial generation is not so different, collectively, that news is beyond their ability nor less important to their future. --Pi zero (talk) 10:45, 10 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Warning[edit]

Do not spam this site with material you know perfectly well is not suitable here. --Pi zero (talk) 17:38, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i cannot detect the reason this time? it has a lead, and references. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 18:22, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You've been told all the principles involved. You've been given pointers to pages explaining it. You posted similarly unacceptable material before. It's not credible you were unaware it wasn't going to be suitable. The warning stands. --Pi zero (talk) 19:13, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]