Talk:Astronomers report dwarf star with unexpectedly giant planet

Notes

I was going to say "astounding astronomers," but I didn't want it to look as if the star was home to impressive scientists.

I am super tired right now, so while I would ordinarily hit the review button myself, I am going to snooze first. I do not mind if the someone-who-has-slept-recently who hits the button isn't me. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:18, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

What else? I listed the actual paper as an external link because I'm not using it as a source. (I only put the paper itself among sources when I've read it carefully and included some of its own information in the Wikinews article.) This of course does not prevent anyone else from moving it.

Right. And the paper lists two dates, October 30 and October 31. I used the earlier one, "Monday." Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:23, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

@Robertinventor: Your bailiwick, I believe. Darkfrog24 (talk)

Oh, the article says "Accepted for publication October 20, published October 31". But the Arxiv.org summary says accepted for publication October 30". I'm inclined to go by what it says on the article itself for the "accepted" date of October 20 over arxiv.org but I think it would be most usual to give the publication date so perhaps we don't need to resolve that, I'd just say published 31st October. It might have been embargoed until after the announcement, as that's quite common. Seems it was first submitted on 13th Sept BTW [1] Robertinventor (talk) 09:24, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I'm talking about 30 vs 31. "Accepted for publication" is a thing in science publishing. It means that's when it made it past peer review. Say you've got a journal that publishes monthly but you've got reviewers working on applicant articles every day. Something might be declared suitable on the 1st or the 12th or at any time but you're still only going to publish once a month. Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:48, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I've tweaked the headline. --Pi zero (talk) 00:15, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

And then changed it again. --Pi zero (talk) 21:51, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Boy Genius Report...

Isn't that a blog website? Is it reliable? (@Pi zero:)
acagastya PING ME! 08:53, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I asked myself the same question, so I checked its about us page and it looked okay.[2] This is the part I found particularly useful: "Geller regularly provides expert analysis for acclaimed news programs on networks such as CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and NBC News, and BGR has been quoted by countless globally recognized media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, TIME Magazine, Barron’s, Los Angeles Times and many others." On Wikipedia, this would be considered an expert self-published source.

While it might be worthwhile to give BGR Wikinews' stamp of approval or disapproval for future articles, it's not that big of a deal for this one because there are more sources available if we need to replace it. For now, the Fox News source is independent of both others. Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:42, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

For utmost clarity: This article needs a minimum of two sources. I say Eurekalert and Fox do that. Consider BGR an extra. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:51, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Your "one extra" approach is not okay. It must be used. I assume you would have, but it must not be there just for "an extra." FOX, lol!
acagastya PING ME! 16:59, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't mean extra as in extraneous or unnecessary, Acagastya. I drew information from all three sources. BGR had information that the other two did not. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:34, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

The way you say it matters. I don't know if you had done something like that in the past or not, but when you say it like this, it is worrying. But we haven't discussed about trustworthiness/reliability of BGR yet.
acagastya PING ME! 17:41, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: The page you link is BGR's self-description. I would expect Breitbart News to describe itself as reliable. I've not yet applied myself to this (just atm I can't get to it before morning at least, ten or eleven hours from now), and I agree it's a good sign, but we're going to need broader perspective with which to assess it. --Pi zero (talk) 00:51, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. Would you like to do it separately? I realize time's a factor, but I could remove the content supported by BGR from this article while we abscond to another page to evaluate BGR as a source. I'm a little busy right this minute, so I'll only do it if you think it would help. I don't have the budget for six-to-one-half-a-dozen-to-the-other right now. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:36, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I found the MediaBias.com review of BGR: [3] It talks about using loaded words when discussing political matters, nothing we don't routinely extract when dealing with traditional print media. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:55, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Also of some interest: Boy Genius Report. --Pi zero (talk) 16:54, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Headline

This headline does not tell anything unique, special, or newsworthy. To be honest, it reads like a click bait headlines. But this article was renamed because the previous version didn't simplify things, and the way that was presented, that was horrible. I wouldn't have clicked on it even if I was paid for it. It is not how a news headline should be. Moreover, it's lede, or even the whole article fails to tell what is the unique thing, and why is it newsworthy. Please go through the comments and improve the article.
acagastya PING ME! 13:27, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the click-bait thing, myself. "You won't believe what this dwarf and giant have been doing together!" is click bait; it's trying to draw clicks under false pretences. The current headline intends, I think, to tell people what the article is about, so they can make an intelligent decision about whether they're interested to read more. I asked someone here what they thought of the headline, without telling them any details of objections raised, and they said it made them want to read the article. The flaw in the current headline, I think, is that it's not describing an event, rather it's describing a state of affairs. It doesn't indicate that some specific event happened. --Pi zero (talk) 16:42, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Click bait isn't necessarily limited to "X did Y" -- if Indian media is good at something, they are, in writing such headline -- they would skip important things which should be mentioned in headline. And this headline does similar -- making readers think wonder why are astronomers puzzled. It might be just in front of our eyes, "Dwarf star has giant planet", but, so what? That does not sound anything like unique, or news. The problem is magnified since the article also fails to explain the picture.
acagastya PING ME! 16:53, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps you're reacting to the difference between "this is unexpected" (which the article does talk a bit about in the second paragraph) and "this is puzzling" (which would seem to require rather more supporting detail in the article)? --Pi zero (talk) 17:05, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Even for that, there should be some fact which make this "newsworthy". Is there a theoretical limit for the ratio? It the ratio significantly larger than the next pair, if yes, by how much. Why can't small stars have large planets? How large is that planet, how small is that star? Without those figures, we are not reporting the more important facts, which anyone would want to know for these articles.
acagastya PING ME! 17:19, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

1) I'm not asking you to change the new title. I think it's better than the old one because it's less awkward. 2) This goes back to the issue of how science news differs from other news. The truly important event was millions of years ago when the planet formed. Even if we treat the event as the discovery and release of this information to the public, the point is that the planet is there and has been for a long time. Most of the events we talk about on Wikinews have to do with a change of some kind. Puerto Rico changed from an undamaged place to a hurricane-damaged place. Donald Trump changed from someone who wasn't a president to someone who is. Kim Jong Nam and Debbie Reynolds changed from alive to dead. From a human perspective, this planet was always there; we just didn't know about it. Most scientific work is like that, learning what the world is in the present tense. "The weird planet is there" seems a lot more important (and concise) to me than "human beings changed from not knowing to knowing the weird planet is there." Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:41, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Whatever the above paragraph is trying to say, why is the "discovery" newsworthy? There are objects discovered every day. What particularly was notable in this case to make it news when you had no supporting information to share?
acagastya PING ME! 01:18, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

"No supporting information"? Don't exaggerate. I could believe that information that you happened to want or believed would improve the article was not among the information provided. Exaggerating gets in the way of meaningful discussion because it makes it harder to take you seriously when people really ought to.

To take an example, "Why wouldn't a small star have a large planet," look at the first sentence of the second paragraph. Perhaps you missed it the first few times through. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:58, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

I had read the article multiple times. There is no information about what type of star it revolves around. It is possible for a neutron star to have planets revolving around it. After all, density are escape velocity have a linear relation. Supporting information would be what are the dimensions of that planet and the star, what was the gravitational pull, mass or lux. It is rather odd for such article not to mention these facts. If you find exaggerating, the only conclusion I can make is that you do not think about answering the questions a reader would wonder about, after reading the article. NOte: even mentioning the type of star does not necessarily explain why that can not happen [else we won't have this article]. Can you answer why the astronomers believed that system could not exist?
acagastya PING ME! 02:22, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

There is no information about what type of star it revolves around: The article reads "NGTS-1b's star, though, is a relatively dim red M-dwarf" and "its parent star is small and faint."

That's what I mean by exaggeration. "There is no information" is not literally true. What you meant was probably more like "I feel this article would be much better if it listed lux and escape velocity and other specific numerical stats." That's perfectly legitimate. But it takes a double-take for me stop and figure out that you don't mean it literally—in my post above I thought you just hadn't seen the information. After all, if I was tired when I first wrote it, maybe you were tired when you read it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:42, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

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If you can not explain things in your article, or if the article isn't ready, do not submit it. There is still no explanation about why they believed it was not possible. Until and unless the article answers it, I would feel this is another random "heavenly body" discovered.
acagastya PING ME! 02:47, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

There is still no explanation about why they believed it was not possible The article reads "[small stars] cannot not pull in enough mass."

Now if you feel that could have been expressed more clearly or highlighted brighter, that's one thing, and you're of course welcome to make any improvements yourself, but I did make sure the article was presentable when submitted for review. Darkfrog24 (talk) 05:04, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Darkfrog24, you know the escape velocity is independent of the radius of the star, right? Neutron stars, on the order of 10 kilometres can have planets. It is the density which comes into picture. Small XYS can not pull PQR is factually incorrect without mentioning the density. Think about all those eleventh grade students who would be wondering if what you wrote is true, because they studied something else in their physics class.
acagastya PING ME! 14:54, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I recall you've said similar things before, about the "important" event being something in the far past. No; that's a serious misconception. There is not some "truly important event" far in the past. There is a focal event in the recent past, of which you are taking a snapshot. There can be lots and lots of stuff about the far past (well, claims about the far past, anyway), but the organizing principle of the news article, starting with making it news at all rather than encyclopedic, is the focal event. Learn to think of the whole structure in terms of how everything relates to the focal event.

I'm remembering something from several decades ago... this probably won't help, but I'll mention it anyway. P.J. Plauger had some advice, long ago (in an excellent monthly column called Programming on Purpose), on ways to structure a computer program. As best I recall (I could look this up if I weren't so lazy, as I have every issue of the long-gone magazine it was in), he described writing a diagram of how data flows between the major modules of the program, and then, he said, to derive a top-down structure for the program, take hold of that graph by any particular module and give it a good hard shake, so the whole diagram ends up being a tree with at the top (the "root node") of it that one module you were holding onto. Voila; top-down structure. My point is this. Organizing a news article around a focal event is a little — at least, a little — like that. With, no doubt, lots of obvious differences, starting with the fact that Plauger's metaphor involved choosing an arbitrary module, whereas with a news story there's probably only one best choice of focal event at a given time. But it's still, arguably, true that you take the network of related parts that make up the content of the news story, pick it up by the focal event, and give it a good hard shake to get a structure depending from the focal event. (I have this pessimistic vision that I'll be trying to clear up misunderstandings from this metaphor for ages, but I thought I'd give it a try.) --Pi zero (talk) 01:34, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Must be the conversation on this page, @Pi zero: Talk:Telegram introduces unsend messages and data usage statistics features
acagastya PING ME! 01:51, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

EDIT CONFLICT: I think the reason we keep coming back to this is that other news outlets, though they do do it for political and sports news, don't use that model for scientific discoveries. It's not clear why Wikinews would. With features and editorials, I suppose it's the neutrality element of Proejct Wiki overall, but none of that seems to apply here. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:58, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: Msm coverage of science is terrible. We strive to avoid mistakes/weaknesses of msm; I recall thinking, on various occasions in the past when you've remarked on the comparison/contrast between us and msm, that you've overestimated how different we are from the highest ideals of professional journalism (granted we're a wiki and there are some consequences of that), but we're not msm wannabes here.

But evidently you're failing to get the message I'm sending. --Pi zero (talk) 02:14, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

If you remember the other articles that I've drafted, you will realize that I understand what a focal point is and can use the concept effectively. The issue is that I don't believe it applies to science news in the same way as to politics and sports, not with your ability to describe the idea, if that's what you meant by "message I'm sending."

What do you see as the weaknesses of MSM on science news? I'm talking publications like the ones we use as sources, Guardian, NYT's science times, and so on. (I don't see treating science news differently from other types of news as a weakness. If science news were held to the same standards of freshness and focal events, none would ever appear in general-audience publications.) Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:30, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

I wonder if you consider the announcement/publication of the study as the focal point or not. Because if you do, I don't think there is a need of an exception for freshness.
acagastya PING ME! 02:34, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't consider it the focal event, but I understand that you and Pi zero do, so I usually structure the articles accordingly. To me, treating the date of publication as a focal event feels like a patch or workaround. 02:44, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

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so according to you, "Snowden revealing what NSA was doing" was never a focal event?
acagastya PING ME! 02:47, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

No, it is. I consider human-culture things that people have kept a secret to be different from facts about the universe that were always there. A whistle-blower revealing secrets is also a lot rarer than scientists publishing the findings of routine research (even when the discovery is groundbreaking, the process is usually routine), though I'm not sure "rare" is quite what I'm going for. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:57, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: You know I've been paying attention to your articles, in fact I've been scrutinizing them — that's the nature of review — and you see that I haven't come to the conclusion you have a solid grasp on the focal event principle. Now you say to acagastya, "I don't consider it the focal event, but I understand that you and Pi zero do"; what that shows is that you don't get the principle. You're misunderstanding what an article focus is. And I've just tried to explain it to you and it seems you weren't even aware that that was what I was trying to do — which tbh makes perfect sense: I'm trying to explain something to you that you don't understand, and it's not working because you're unaware that you don't understand. You've stopped moving forward in your Wikinewsie skills on this and a number of other fronts, and it really seems part of the trouble is that your shortcomings in those areas aren't visible to you. I don't know how to help with that, if there is any way to help; you're an immensely valuable contributor, either way (do you have any idea — well, I suspect you do — how beyond price it is on a volunteer wiki to have someone who looks for ways to sneak in time to contribute?), but you would be yet more valuable for getting past this hurdle. --Pi zero (talk) 03:04, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

No, I got that you were trying to explain what a focal event was using a computer programming metaphor. I'm not a programmer, so the metaphor doesn't mean much to me. I just mentally subbed in your previous posts on the matter.

This reminds me of something that happened at grad school. To paraphrase, I asked a professor "what's an apple" and got a seven-minute speech about apple pie that didn't include "an apple is a kind of fruit." Well, you're doing a lot better than that guy, and it's not even your job to teach things.

I'm not a computer programmer, so let's go with what I am. Why not define the term as you see it, with a definition made out of words?

"A funnel opening is an introductory paragraph or group of sentences that starts with a wide-ranging or even vague reference to of the core concept and then grows more specific until it has contracted to the specific matter at hand." Like that. I didn't say what a funnel opening was like or why it was important or what it reminded me of. I said what it is. I didn't dwell and try to get the definition perfect, I just did it in one go. So in your own view, Pi zero, what is a focal event?

Like with the water cooler discussion of freshness, if we define what it is, we can translate it for science news. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:57, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Turns out that the density of the star was more than the Sun, and density of the planet was almost a third of Jupiter. "Massive planet", "dwarf star". I think I should expect you to comment about the inverse square law, and give credit to radius. But, I could not find the distance. So, I did what I could, more than I should. You still have time to explain why such it could not "pull" now that the density is mentioned.
acagastya PING ME! 17:08, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Review of revision 4361671 [Passed]

Revision 4361671 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 22:15, 3 November 2017 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: To be clear, writing news for a general audience should not mean "dumbing down" the material. Not omitting significant details. Nor summarizing — summary is a vice of encyclopedias, which cannot help doing so (it's what an encyclopedia is), that removes details a news article should provide, and in removing things introduces bias. A good news source should be a place one can go to answer questions raised by a summary. An inverted pyramid allows us to provide more and more information, going further and further into things as one descends. I had to stretch my reviewer's purview to encompass points that really needed to be disambiguated, and there were more points that might have been answerable from the source but weren't answered, some of which acagastya mentioned in comments. Be precise. It wouldn't have been hard for us to have a more precise article than any of the sources — a mild foray into the paper itself told me some fascinating things that seem like low-hanging fruit (yes, I know time to write for Wikinews is at a premium, just like time to review for it; I'm just saying, here's something to aspire to). The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.

Revision 4361671 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 22:15, 3 November 2017 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: To be clear, writing news for a general audience should not mean "dumbing down" the material. Not omitting significant details. Nor summarizing — summary is a vice of encyclopedias, which cannot help doing so (it's what an encyclopedia is), that removes details a news article should provide, and in removing things introduces bias. A good news source should be a place one can go to answer questions raised by a summary. An inverted pyramid allows us to provide more and more information, going further and further into things as one descends. I had to stretch my reviewer's purview to encompass points that really needed to be disambiguated, and there were more points that might have been answerable from the source but weren't answered, some of which acagastya mentioned in comments. Be precise. It wouldn't have been hard for us to have a more precise article than any of the sources — a mild foray into the paper itself told me some fascinating things that seem like low-hanging fruit (yes, I know time to write for Wikinews is at a premium, just like time to review for it; I'm just saying, here's something to aspire to). The reviewed revision should automatically have been edited by removing {{Review}} and adding {{Publish}} at the bottom, and the edit sighted; if this did not happen, it may be done manually by a reviewer.

That's odd. What did you think was left out?

You are correct about why I did not use the paper itself this time. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:32, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Dumbing down is a relative word. While I was writing that Kazakh article, some things were too obvious for me but it might not be for someone else. Or for triple talaq, that explanation would be "dumbing down" for those who know about it. But for those who does not know, it is important information which, if not provided, does not make sense. (Another example, explaining how electoral college works for Donald Trump's article.) Dumbing down should not omit details. And it is better to frame it such that it does not feel like dumbing down to the people who already know about it.
acagastya PING ME! 01:23, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, things tend to involve adding explanations. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:58, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

commented sources

@Pi zero: what about those sources I had used, but Date of Access was after the date of publication?
acagastya PING ME! 09:53, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Confused tags...

{{editprotected}}

To date, scientists have discovered only three gas giants which revolves around M-dwarf stars. The other two are Kepler-45b and HATS-6b which have masses 0.505 M<sub>J</sub> and 0.32 M<sub>J</sup> respectively.

This should be uniform, sub and sup tags must balance. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:43, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Done
•–• 16:44, 9 September 2020 (UTC)