Talk:Israel issues travel ban on 20 non-government organizations over pro-Palestinian boycotts

Style

I realize this article is still being developed, but what's with the all-caps "BECAUSE THE UN HAS CLASSIFIED BOYCOTTS AS FREE SPEECH CONFIRM THIS." --SVTCobra 14:15, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

You have it exactly: those are production notes. The all caps are so that the article cannot go into review without those issues first being addressed, either by me or by a colleague. This isn't Wikipedia, so the article doesn't have to be presentable throughout all stages of its life cycle. Same with your other issue: Of course I wouldn't hit review with only one source, but an unpublished draft doesn't need two or even one. I didn't have time to find a second source just then, but that didn't mean no one did. I often start a draft and put it in the development hopper. I usually end up finishing them myself, but sometimes someone else will pick up where I left off. And sometimes I pick up where other people left off. This is a collaborative project after all.

By all means, whenever you see notes in caps or only one source, feel free to jump in. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:31, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

We strongly recommend not starting to write until after one has multiple sources and have read them all. --Pi zero (talk) 19:35, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Sources

This needs a secondary source, at a minimum.--SVTCobra 15:55, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Review of revision 4374840 [Not ready]

Revision 4374840 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 20:47, 9 January 2018 (UTC). Copyright: Not ready: See below. Newsworthiness: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Comments by reviewer: Preliminary check for similarities to sources turned up a scattering of segments (for the prelim check I used automation to suggest bits to look at, which I then consider in their context; as opposed to picking up deeper similarities later from in-depth study, which is hard to do if I'm already worn from fixing things turned up at prelim). Two of those segments were in the first sentence of the lede, both in fact from the first sentence of the i23NEWS source, which worried me. A couple of passages near the end of the third paragraph, from different sources, seemed probably forgivable, except perhaps to worry of whether they might hint at problems to be discovered later in the review (such discovery is stressful and to be avoided if at all possible). But then I found two segments in the last sentence, considered the overall situation, and realized the whole sentence is in the Guardian except with one word replaced by an effective-synonym (it's just icing on the cake that the replacement word has the same first and last letters as the original). This shouldn't happen. Deleting the sentence outright would alter the balance of the picture presented, which doesn't seem like something to do for such a semantically-arbitrary reason; and completely rewriting the sentence, which is what's needed at minimum if it's not to be deleted, is clearly outside my purview (at least, not under normal circumstances). I did wonder a little about the sources, which seem somewhat uniform in perspective; the Guardian keeps it from being all Israeli sources, at least, but still. Questions about the above? Ask. If possible, please address the above issues then resubmit the article for another review (by replacing {{tasks}} in the article with {{review}}). This talk page will be updated with subsequent reviews.

Revision 4374840 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 20:47, 9 January 2018 (UTC). Copyright: Not ready: See below. Newsworthiness: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Comments by reviewer: Preliminary check for similarities to sources turned up a scattering of segments (for the prelim check I used automation to suggest bits to look at, which I then consider in their context; as opposed to picking up deeper similarities later from in-depth study, which is hard to do if I'm already worn from fixing things turned up at prelim). Two of those segments were in the first sentence of the lede, both in fact from the first sentence of the i23NEWS source, which worried me. A couple of passages near the end of the third paragraph, from different sources, seemed probably forgivable, except perhaps to worry of whether they might hint at problems to be discovered later in the review (such discovery is stressful and to be avoided if at all possible). But then I found two segments in the last sentence, considered the overall situation, and realized the whole sentence is in the Guardian except with one word replaced by an effective-synonym (it's just icing on the cake that the replacement word has the same first and last letters as the original). This shouldn't happen. Deleting the sentence outright would alter the balance of the picture presented, which doesn't seem like something to do for such a semantically-arbitrary reason; and completely rewriting the sentence, which is what's needed at minimum if it's not to be deleted, is clearly outside my purview (at least, not under normal circumstances). I did wonder a little about the sources, which seem somewhat uniform in perspective; the Guardian keeps it from being all Israeli sources, at least, but still. Questions about the above? Ask. If possible, please address the above issues then resubmit the article for another review (by replacing {{tasks}} in the article with {{review}}). This talk page will be updated with subsequent reviews.

So something's too similar to something else. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:50, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

I reread all three sources, and I see the problem with the last line but not with the opening paragraph. There's just not much in here that isn't a direct quote or a list. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:59, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I recomend toollabs:dupdet; as a technological artifact it lacks understanding of what it detects, but it makes a useful starting point for a prelim check. --Pi zero (talk) 21:06, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

This gizmo says we're good. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:12, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: It isn't a binary test. It can sometimes help by providing clues to problem areas for a human to look at more closely, when trying to find things sooner rather than later. It worries me some that, checking the diffs for the changes you made, you're going about addressing these things by introducing synonyms, which is specifically one of the worst things that can be done, arguably worse than verbatim copying in that, at scale, it doesn't eliminate plagiary but makes it harder to detect on casual inspection (instead it turns up, stressfully, during in-depth review). As I often remark when I make small changes to address such problems during review, the things I'm able to do as a reviewer are hobbled by the limitations on what a reviewer can do without self-disqualifying, and should not be taken as a model of how to fix such problems as a reporter. Wholly rearranging the grammatical structure is better, and better still is to distributing information such that bits of information from each source sentence are scattered all hither-and-yon across the synthesis article, while bits of information in a synthesis sentence are from all hither-and-yon across the sources. --Pi zero (talk) 21:49, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

"Specifically one of the worst things" according to whom? Is there some text or manual you're consulting? Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:17, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Just reread the WPA on plagiarism; it's not in there, but that's kind of not what WPA does. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:37, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Hm. Seems to me that you tend to ground things in style guides, rules; while I tend to ground things in intuitive principles, structures in the Platonic realm. Broadly speaking; that's a start at describing how we think differently, anyway; I see the difference in thinking modes intuitively, which is sticky as it may be a route to understanding that works better for someone on my side of the difference. Further confusing things, you may understand the word "intuition" differently than I do. (I'm reminded of non-cognitivism.) Ugh; what a tangle.

At any rate, what you've got as your primary resource is a living repository of knowledge, namely me, that afaics you have, how to put this, limited trust in, perhaps ultimately because we do think differently; and what you want is, seemingly, a set of written guidelines. I'm not without sympathy for the problem of not having available the tool one could most readily use. In the specific instance, the synonym thing is mentioned at WN:Plagiarism, for whatever that is worth from your perspective. --Pi zero (talk) 23:20, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Here's why I asked: If you are relying on something based on your own experience, then it exists inside your head. I do not mean "in your head" in the sense of "not real" but rather in the sense of "inaccessible to other people," in this case myself. If you were relying on a manual of some kind, I could ask which one and gain access to it. I had been planning to ask you to write an essay, effectively transferring your knowledge from inside your head to outside of it, but if one already exists, great. EDIT: Turns out it doesn't. Consider an essay.

The other problem is that you don't want me to rely on intuition in general but often seem to want me to prefer your intuition to my own, to submit to you. On Project Wiki, you are not my superior but my equal. Professional published guides and journalists' resources, on the other hand, are superior to us both in this specific respect. It is appropriate for you to say, "I want you to refer to this specific reference used by professional journalists" but not appropriate for you to say, "disregard your own judgment and habits and use mine." I find it quite disturbing, actually. I've deliberately toned it down for this post.

I've seen you get offended when I call myself your equal, so it might help if you look at it this way: I am a volunteer who is at least partially anonymous and has not presented any verifiable professional journalistic credentials. So are you.

It is not you specifically, Pi zero. My knowledge of you gives me reason to value your opinions and conclusions that do not pertain to strangers. I would be creeped out if any one person told me to do that.

EDIT: I see WN:PLAGIARISM is a draft of a guideline. That would explain why I don't remember seeing it before. EDIT2: Okay, I read it. It's more "why plagiarism is bad," on which we are on the same page, and less "specific techniques and expectations," which is what I was expecting.

I do not consider our current discussion to pertain to the readiness of this article specifically, anyone in the review team, she is ready for you. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:14, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

It is moderately, though not perfectly, separate from the specific article, with the caveat that the measures you took are less than ideal exactly because of this point. A typical remark I'll not-uncommonly use in review comments would be, "Do not copy passages from the sources; also, do not copy passages and then 'scuff them up' with superficial changes like substituting 'synonoms' or simply changing tenses or the like, which does not avoid accusations of plagiary." I recall BRS imitated the phrasing (implying approval of the sentiment), though for me scuff up is familiar phrasing whereas I guess for BRS it seemed more like dialect, which is how I ended up imitating BRS's use of quotes around "scuff them up".

A great deal of what we have on various aspects of our best practices is in drafts, essays, message templates... it's all over the place, really, as writing really well-organized documents about these things is incredibly difficult and we would have to give up entirely on ever publishing any news in order to devote all our time to it — a plan with obvious failings, such as (a) producing news is what motivates us, so if the project were about writing documents about how to write news, none of us would be here; and (b) without our hands-on experience producing news, we wouldn't be qualified to write about how to do it. (I suppose I'm saying that without the actual news production, we wouldn't write up our practices and if we did there'd be no reason for anyone to read them.)

When I have to tell people, in review comments, to read up on the copyright/plagiarism issue, I generally say there is some compact advice at WN:PILLARS#own and discussion at WN:Plagiarism; you are quite right that WN:Plagiarism is mainly about why it's bad. There's meta-discussion about that essay on its talk page, too. However, you were asking if the point about synonyms is written down somewhere, so I mentioned that it does get a bit of a mention there. Some time ago I did, in fact, start to attempt an essay for which I had what I thought a great title, "How to use sources without plagiary". The effort fell apart because I felt that a flat text would fail to convey the message: I wanted something interactive, to try to share with the essay's audience the eye-opening experience of seeing the mapping of information from sources to synthesis in a really well-written synthesis article, which I had experienced from actually doing a review of such an article and have been trying ever since to figure out how to share with newbies. If you're morbidly curious, my early efforts toward that essay are at User:Pi zero/essays/How to use sources without plagiary.

I'm aware of not articulating well this difference I see in modes of thinking. --Pi zero (talk) 01:56, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

There is no time limit on finding a way to express yourself and you've earned being listened to.

I think what's going on is that you see yourself as offering your experience as a resource, but it is really not coming off that way. Not to the point where I'd tell you not to approach anyone else. I could see a kid who has no experience of their own to draw on reacting well to it, but it's been bothering me a lot. Making an offer is being nice but I've given you "no thanks" for an answer many times by now.

And that's not hypothetical. I actually do have some professional-level experience that I'm drawing on. I don't want to go into detail. Maybe that will make you feel better about my preferring my own judgement to yours in the absence of verifiable sources. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:48, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Read the essay draft. Viewed the source you used. I actually have a copy of Hacker's style manual right here on my shelf. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:52, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

To be clear, I didn't use Hacker, and the Further reading list there isn't a list of where I got my info from. I don't think I've ever seen Hacker; but I did notice that, as remarked, both of those other resources cited Hacker.

I'd kind of gotten the impression you might have journalistic experience of some sort and degree; I can't say it makes me feel better, or worse, but it is useful perspective, for which I thank you. There are some things about the likenesses and differences of Wikinews to/from traditional journalism that I don't think you've quite grokked, which seems to me to be mostly about understanding Wikinews, with conceivably a bit of being too close to traditional journalism to clearly see some things about it.

There are two deep aspects of Wikinews that I've yet to figure how to explain for you. The two, btw, are not separate, but entangled with each other. One, Wikinews approaches expertise differently than Wikipedia does. Two, the underlying principles of Wikinews form a coherent whole in the Platonic realm. How are those entangled? Well, the underlying principles are intuitive, and that intuitive coherence is part of what makes the approach to expertise work. Which is also where those (perhaps odd-seeming) remarks I made about different ways of thinking come into play. The coherent intuition needs to be shared across a core cadre of Wikinewsies, and that only works if that group of individuals have sufficiently similar minds that the common intuition can settle comfortably into all of them. But not everyone has the same cognitive type (I've some peripheral background on cognitive types); it seems the shared intuition of Wikinews principles is not really of the right... er... shape for all types of minds, or at least parts of it aren't, and even if some parts can exist comfortably in all cognitive types, communicating intuitions between distant cognitive types can be quite problematic. I've conjectured that that's part of why I've been short of luck in some of my explanations to you. -Pi zero (talk) 05:20, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I was more commenting on how the conversation had come full circle and, intentionally or not, you have directed me toward the resource I asked about—and my copy has an instructional section and it confirms that you're right on a lot of points here. You have backed up what you said. Maybe you didn't use Hacker, but I'm fine with using Hacker.

The problem might be that you're trying to do a job that does not belong to just one person. Even if you wrote an essay that perfectly expressed your ideas, they would still be the ideas of one person with no verified credentials. Although it would be wise to listen to you, no one individual would have any reason to obey you. We don't have enough people to use consensus the way we do on Wikipedia, but deferring professionally published sources still works. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:32, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Ultimately, there is no reason for anyone to believe anyone else, ever. Since things like Cogito ergo sum are not generally accepted as unassailable reasoning. I don't mean to be flippant about it, either, but rather to bring out an important practical point; the bottom line, when I say something and you choose not to believe me, is that you choose not to believe me. And there is nothing I can do about your choice except that, if it assures you will not understand Wikinews, I can regret it, and continue to discuss things with you in case additional bandwidth makes a difference. (There is some similarity to our erstwhile discussions about quotation punctuation, though that's not encouraging, just possibly a useful analogy.)

I have observed that the concept of consensus as conceived and practiced on Wikipedia has a flaw, to do with time and the input of past contributors. I've occasionally observed the flaw in action on Wikipedia, although for various reasons (both to do with Wikipedia and to do with the other projects I contribute to) my Wikipedian activity has declined greatly so I've had fewer and fewer opportunities to observe phenomena on Wikipedia lately. When I expanded my horizons to include Wikibooks, I was immediately confronted by the reality that on Wikibooks, consensus treats time rather differently than it does on Wikipedia; I didn't at first think of it in those terms, but it was one of the first things I experienced on Wikibooks. I later further expanded my horizons to include Wikinews, and the difference in treatment of time is even more extreme here, with a related side helping of attitude toward expertise. I recall trying to articulate this for you before, without success (hard to say how much of that was failure to articulate, or failure to articulate sufficiently, versus how much was choice-not-to-believe... if there is indeed a meaningful difference between those). At any rate, it's all an aspect of the whole Wikinews-works-differently-than-Wikipedia thing. --Pi zero (talk) 14:13, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Actually there are reasons for people to believe each other: evidence and verified credentials.

"You choose not to believe me" puts way too much of this on me. There is also the partially objective matter of whether you've made a convincing case or provided any sources. "Do as I say because I say so, because I'm me and you're you. It is for me to order and for you to obey" is degrading. After all, there are matters on which I've made convincing cases and provided sources and you have persisted in your own view nonetheless. You get to do that. It's no insult to me personally, and my preferring my own judgement to yours is no insult to you.

I get the impression that you want to mentor someone. That someone isn't me. I decline. Maybe our next round of journalism students will provide you with a relationship that satisfies you. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:09, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Someone comes to the project, not knowing things they need to know about the project. There's a general path, with lots of variations of course, by which they hopefully learn about the project; largely, by watching what happens and receiving feedback from reviewers, with some reading of available project documentation mixed in. As they learn, two things happen. The articles they submit are of higher and higher quality, not necessarily in details but rather in deep principles, stuff that when off kilter can be hightly stressful for a reviewer, so that reviewing their articles becomes immensely easier. And somewhere along the way they move into "colleague" territory in their relationship to the inner circle of Wikinewsies. A great deal of this relies on the new user catching on to the intuitive pattern of the underlying principles. Catching the pattern is what allows them to keep improving so as to reach the point where their articles get much easier to review, and others recognizing that they've caught the pattern is key in the colleague-status thing. So when someone doesn't make that catch, they stop moving along the path, and those two good things that ought to happen after a while, don't. The project works best when they do happen.

My part in all this? I've been systematically sucking in knowledge (intuition as well as information) about the project; Wikinews, with its reliance of expertise, needs stronger passing-on of living tradition than, say, Wikipedia, at the same time it has fewer people to do the passing on, and so here I've been, soaking this stuff up and sharing it with others. (A particular case, btw, is the reminder list at WN:Tips on reviewing articles, which has quite a few links back to where stuff is mentioned.) Depending on circumstances, my exchanges of knowledge-base with people could be mostly one-way or two-way. I've no first-hand knowledge of the thing Wikipedians these days call "mentoring", though it sounds a bit on the rigid side. --Pi zero (talk) 17:15, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Review of revision 4375022 [Passed]

Revision 4375022 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 23:47, 10 January 2018 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Regarding the last sentence here, and the source sentence it comes from. It's quite difficult to take a simple sentence like that and thoroughly rephrase it — but the solution is (as in the classic Vaudeville gag), don't do that. Don't map a single source sentence to a single synthesis sentence at all; break up and redistribute, with information from any sentence on either side of the source/synthesis boundary mapping to widely scattered locations on the other side of the boundary. The sentence involved here is actually rather poor form, as it's vague; surely not every human rights group on the planet did this, so who is actually the actor in this sentence? (I chose not to make a huge deal out of it, down at the very bottom of the inverted pyramid, but I wonder if I should have objected after all.) I did try to point out, in discussion of the earlier not-ready review, that more radical solutions would be preferable; the discussion somehow got loose and wandered far afield from that point. A few other points came up during review (as usual, see the edit history), but not too many. The list was a bit confusing due to the structure imposed on it verbally but not reflected by dual-level separating punctuation; and the point about refugees who married non-Jews needed some attention. 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 4375022 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 23:47, 10 January 2018 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Regarding the last sentence here, and the source sentence it comes from. It's quite difficult to take a simple sentence like that and thoroughly rephrase it — but the solution is (as in the classic Vaudeville gag), don't do that. Don't map a single source sentence to a single synthesis sentence at all; break up and redistribute, with information from any sentence on either side of the source/synthesis boundary mapping to widely scattered locations on the other side of the boundary. The sentence involved here is actually rather poor form, as it's vague; surely not every human rights group on the planet did this, so who is actually the actor in this sentence? (I chose not to make a huge deal out of it, down at the very bottom of the inverted pyramid, but I wonder if I should have objected after all.) I did try to point out, in discussion of the earlier not-ready review, that more radical solutions would be preferable; the discussion somehow got loose and wandered far afield from that point. A few other points came up during review (as usual, see the edit history), but not too many. The list was a bit confusing due to the structure imposed on it verbally but not reflected by dual-level separating punctuation; and the point about refugees who married non-Jews needed some attention. 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.