Wikinews:Archive conventions

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

This page is an official policy on the English Wikinews. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcut: WN:ARCHIVE

Archive conventions on Wikinews are particularly important because Wikinews is not an encyclopedia. Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Because articles published on Wikinews may serve as references of their time, the project description describes a final stage for articles in which they are protected from further edits. The conventions in this document describe how to implement this final archival stage on Wikinews, but are not rules or policy.

General Conventions

Age for Protection

Any article which is published and dated no less than seven days from the current date should be archived per the process described below. Articles which have been published for more than 36 hours should not undergo significant edits, in case of a conflict on this basis administrators may apply protection early. In such circumstances the article should have the pre-protection process described below applied once it is ten days old.

Dates are UTC

Datelines are established by UTC time of when the article was published.

Talk Pages are not protected

Article talk pages are not protected. Discussions regarding post-archival edits to an article should take place on the article's talk page.

Post-archival edits

After an article has been protected, it should no longer be edited on elements of content, sources, or other substance. It should be edited for non-content issues (such as spelling, typos, punctuation and so forth) on a case-by-case basis. Questions of grammar are prone to dispute, and should be implemented after consensus on the talk page. Use Wikinews:Admin action alerts to highlight that changes are needed.

A note about {{DEFAULTSORTKEY:}}

Please note: It is important that {{DEFAULTSORTKEY:}} (or equivalents such as changing the sortkey on individual categories) never be added to an archived article (If you need to do this, do it at or before time of publish, never after publishing). This is because changing the sortkey of an article in a category changes the date the categorylink was last modified. Wikinews (DPL) uses this date to figure out when an article was published. Changing the sortkey causes the article to jump to the top of latest published list. Which is a bad thing if it was actually published last year.

Pre-protection process

Administrators carrying out archiving should read all articles being archived and copyedit as required. Per notes above, substantial changes cannot be made, but the set of checks listed below may require significant copyedit work.

• Late edits should be undone, this requires that the history of the article be checked for edits more than 48 hours after application of the {{publish}} tag. Minor corrections such as spelling are acceptable but the addition of information which alters the balance of the article should be reversed.
• Remove tags such as {{expand}}. Once protected an article cannot be expanded and thus this is confusing.
• Remove inline references and excess Wikilinks. Unless absolutely unavoidable there should be no links to a non-wikimedia site within the body of an article. Off-site links should be restricted to the three sections listed below.
• Section names are Related news, Sources, and External links rename accordingly and ensure in this listed order.
• Date format is Month Daynumber, Year. This should be enforced throughout the sources and other sections. However if an article already has a uniform date format used throughout the entire article that is easily understandable, this is not a mandatory change but strongly recommended; automated processing of Wikinews articles may rely on a consistent date format.
• Categories should be added where not present.
• Sources should be sorted newest -> oldest.
• {{Archived}} tag should be added at the end of the article, preferable by putting {{Publish}}, {{Archived}} on individual lines, followed by the categories. Links to other language wikinews sites go last.

Wikipedia's AutoWikiBrowser supports Wikinews and is a useful tool for catching typos and common errors. It is, however, no substitute for the current version of the human eyeball.

Article layout

Without heading into instruction creep, the format of the wikicode within an article should be made consistent.

• Date template. The date template is usually followed with a blank line. Exceptions are when the dateline template is used for original reporting and thus a location is given or where an infobox, picture, or other template replaces the blank line between the date template and the first paragraph.
• Pictures and other graphics. Where these are incorporated they substitute for the blank lines between paragraphs. Excess white space before/after pictures can result in odd spacing when the article is rendered.
• Section headings. If an article has been broken into sub-sections these should be H3 headings (i.e. use "=== text ==="). The standard article headings are H2, == Related news ==, == Sources ==, and == External links ==. They should always be in that order to focus on our material and have off-site links given a lower priority.
• Original reporting. The original tag should be placed immediately after the == Sources == heading, no blank lines before or after the tag.
• Publish. the publish tag should be placed after the sources, one blank line preceding it, the archive tag on the next line then categories.
• Categories and interwiki links should be the very last thing in the article. AWB will do this, putting a blank line after the categories and positioning interwiki links at the end.

To archive

Articles published no later than February 2 should be archived. (Refresh)

• 4 February 2010: Monster.com aquires Yahoo's HotJobs service for $225 million
• 4 February 2010: Pakistan arrests 35 people suspected in US soldiers' death
• 4 February 2010: Interview with Liz Mumby, independent candidate in Australian by-election for the Victorian state electorate of Altona
• 4 February 2010: China and US clash over currency
• 5 February 2010: NTSB says pilot error caused crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407
• 5 February 2010: Toyota poised to recall 270,000 Prius vehicles
• 5 February 2010: Concern about sovereign debt of some EU members roils markets
• 5 February 2010: Ten US missionaries charged with child kidnapping in Haiti
• 5 February 2010: South African lawyer and anti-apartheid leader Harry Schwarz dies age 85
• 5 February 2010: Double bombing in Pakistani city leaves at least 22 dead

Note

• The print edition pages should be archived, listed at Wikinews:Print edition.
• Verify the fully-protected version of any article you archive is sighted.