Talk:Italian police charge homeless local with murder of US exchange student

Review of revision 4230048 [Not ready]

Revision 4230048 of this article has been reviewed by Gryllida (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 00:01, 5 July 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Not ready: There is an about 20% match of some phrases to the first source. We are required to put the same information entirely in our own words; that's why we recommend to use two independent sources and write from memory without paraphrasing. Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Passed Style: Not ready: Comments by reviewer: Some essential context is missing. Some claims are attributed wrongly -- for instance, to a relative, or to TV. There are two problems with this. Attribution needs to be given to the primary source and not a secondary source (i.e. a wittness rather than tv) and an 'according to' or 'as ... reported' construct ought to be used to show how this information has come to us. Where attribution to brother is given, it needs to be stated clearly that his role is a witness, and he was not reporting to Wikinews (or another news organization) directly. The way the homicide and wound context is unfolded is messy. It needs to be not only attributed clearly, but also stated in active voice for it to be clear who did these things (and not only the fact that they were done). "Without citing sources or names, which are possibly being withheld from the media at this time for law-enforcement reasons" is an opinion. We can't include opinions. Instead I would say "The Italian News Agency ANSA as well as SKYTG24 News reported that an unnamed witness ..." (my emphasis). We require inverted pyramid structure in articles before they can be published: the recent details go first, unfolding more details from the concise lede, and the background goes last. The first paragraph doesn't answer the required critical questions, known as the five Ws and one H: When - "today" (July 4, 2016) What - found missing body Where - in Tiber river, Rome How - ? Why - ? - because it was missing and there was an active search and rescue operation, or someone found it accidentally when walking near the river? Who - ? - passers by, rescue team people, someone else? I would move the first sentence of the second paragraph to another paragraph, closer down. Regarding style, it is recommended to make a number of changes; those, while fixable by a reviewer, are a good thing for authors to know and do to decrease review times. Create an 'External links' section for the not-recent sources. Wikilink important names and concepts in the text. (Once these issues are fixed, I unfortunately can not review video sources. I would have to leave that to another reviewer. As far as I know, however, they are allowed.) 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 4230048 of this article has been reviewed by Gryllida (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 00:01, 5 July 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Not ready: There is an about 20% match of some phrases to the first source. We are required to put the same information entirely in our own words; that's why we recommend to use two independent sources and write from memory without paraphrasing. Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Passed Style: Not ready: Comments by reviewer: Some essential context is missing. Some claims are attributed wrongly -- for instance, to a relative, or to TV. There are two problems with this. Attribution needs to be given to the primary source and not a secondary source (i.e. a wittness rather than tv) and an 'according to' or 'as ... reported' construct ought to be used to show how this information has come to us. Where attribution to brother is given, it needs to be stated clearly that his role is a witness, and he was not reporting to Wikinews (or another news organization) directly. The way the homicide and wound context is unfolded is messy. It needs to be not only attributed clearly, but also stated in active voice for it to be clear who did these things (and not only the fact that they were done). "Without citing sources or names, which are possibly being withheld from the media at this time for law-enforcement reasons" is an opinion. We can't include opinions. Instead I would say "The Italian News Agency ANSA as well as SKYTG24 News reported that an unnamed witness ..." (my emphasis). We require inverted pyramid structure in articles before they can be published: the recent details go first, unfolding more details from the concise lede, and the background goes last. The first paragraph doesn't answer the required critical questions, known as the five Ws and one H: When - "today" (July 4, 2016) What - found missing body Where - in Tiber river, Rome How - ? Why - ? - because it was missing and there was an active search and rescue operation, or someone found it accidentally when walking near the river? Who - ? - passers by, rescue team people, someone else? I would move the first sentence of the second paragraph to another paragraph, closer down. Regarding style, it is recommended to make a number of changes; those, while fixable by a reviewer, are a good thing for authors to know and do to decrease review times. Create an 'External links' section for the not-recent sources. Wikilink important names and concepts in the text. (Once these issues are fixed, I unfortunately can not review video sources. I would have to leave that to another reviewer. As far as I know, however, they are allowed.) 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.

request for clarification

@Gryllida: Firstly, the point on copyright is deferred for purposes here.

"Where attribution to brother is given, it needs to be stated clearly that his role is a witness, and he was not reporting to Wikinews (or another news organization) directly." 

How so? The source material makes clear that the brother said the claimed facts to media. To cite any other sources seems to be redundant. The outside sources make clear to whom the brother made the statements to outside media, at least from my reading of the outside sources.

"Why - ? - because it was missing and there was an active search and rescue operation, or someone found it accidentally when walking near the river?"

The information would be irrelevant at this point. The only pertinent "Why" question in a suspected homicide that the reader would want to know is "why was the homicide committed". At this point to answer that question would be speculating at best, because no one can have knowledge of that at this point in time. Again, the "How" question can also not be answered with available information without speculating. Therefore, these two questions are omitted for purposes of conservative reporting.

"** Attribution needs to be given to the primary source and not a secondary source (i.e. a wittness rather than tv) and an 'according to' or 'as ... reported' construct ought to be used to show how this information has come to us." 

Question: how is it possible to do so, given that this story is secondary coverage, and the original notes as to whom said what, are not accessible? The way this is presented is the same manner as that source material, which would seem to be the most appropriate manner. You cannot cite directly to a witness when you don't know the identity of that witness, which in this type of report is withheld from media for law enforcement reasons, because the subject of the story encompasses an ongoing police investigation.

"** Where attribution to brother is given, it needs to be stated clearly that his role is a witness, and he was not reporting to Wikinews (or another news organization) directly."

The Source material seems to indicate that he WAS in fact speaking to the media directly.

"The way the homicide and wound context is unfolded is messy. It needs to be not only attributed clearly, but also stated in active voice for it to be clear who did these things (and not only the fact that they were done)."

Are you forgetting the fact that the "Who" is unknown to anyone at this time? However, I defer in certain respects to this point? The passive voice seems more appropriate given the circumstances of available knowledge, unless I'm misinterpreting where your going with this.

"Without citing sources or names, which are possibly being withheld from the media at this time for law-enforcement reasons" is an opinion. We can't include opinions. Instead I would say "The Italian News Agency ANSA as well as SKYTG24 News reported that an unnamed witness ..." (my emphasis)."

This is not an opinion. This is a fact. Standard law enforcement protocol states that names of material witnesses are not given to the media, for any reason under any circumstance, because the provision of that information compromises the police investigation. The manner in which you propose seems to be splitting a hair in such a manner that the former from the latter is not distinguishable.

"Regarding style, it is recommended to make a number of changes; those, while fixable by   a reviewer, are a good thing for authors to know and do to decrease review times."

• Create an 'External links' section for the not-recent sources.
• Wikilink important names and concepts in the text."

The meaning of this is unclear. First, "external links" would be inappropriate, considering that the material IS source material, and thus should be cited in the sources section, as opposed to anywhere else.

Please get back with me on this page to better explain your positions. ScruffMcGruff007 (talk) 01:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

1. Where someone said something to the media, we must say who he said it to, rather than throwing a 'X said Y.' without further commentary.
2. We are reporting on the act of finding the body, not on the act of homicide. The 'why' or 'how' is about the first one.
3. I couldn't perform proper verification, because one of the sources is a video. However, when something was reported on TV, they must have at least tried to tell you where the claim came from.
   • For instance, just throwing "Italian State TV also said that $1,700 had been charged to those cards the day after Solomon disappeared." into an article leads us to believe that the TV people themselves were told that directly and nobody else was. In the source, I find "Cole Solomon, Beau Solomon’s 23-year-old brother, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday ... He added that thousands of dollars were charged to Beau Solomon’s credit card after his disappearance.". I am sure the national TV report included this name of the guy who shared this information. Skipping it in the article is senseless.
4. When I say about active voice, I do not ask you to fill the gap in the sentence '____ killed the student'. We are still reporting on the act of finding the body, not on the act of the murder! And I am sure you can find out who found it.
5. If the 'withheld for law related reasons' is not an opinion, we need to do two things: remove the 'possibly', and clarify precisely what these reasons are.
6. We use 'external links' to list any sources which are over 3 days old and are only used for supporting the background.

Alas, this article is now stale; instead of publishing it, and moving on to publishing a follow-up story about Galileo, we are doing close to nothing. Hopefully the above points help you write your future articles. However, one would hope you find (and exercise) your potential of reading the comments without need to re-ask them; in doing so, we would improve the review and revision time enormously. --Gryllida 23:43, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

@Gryllida: But for the fact that your overlooking that the purpose of "attribution" is to answer the question "who said it", NOT to answer the question "who did they say it to", which is immaterial information, (Why does the reader CARE to which particular media outlet someone said a thing? More particularly, how is this information particularly USEFUL to the reader? Considering that the mainline press won't give reader access source material anyways, which seems to make the point a bit impractical???) This also seems to require the use of language in such a way that would seem to present a bit confusing. Take the following Two sentences for example:

Sentence A:

"According to party A, Party B said something about party C while party D was present."

Sentence B:

"Party B said something about party C while party D was present"

Now, the first thing we notice is that Sentence A is a much more difficult read by comparison. Assuming that the two sentences are Sourced with an identical Source, that actually includes the information in Sentence A, Sentence B conveys all the necessary information. This is why we are providing the source material. IF the reader really wants to know anything else, all the reader has to do is open up the source material.

"If the 'withheld for law related reasons' is not an opinion, we need to do two things: remove the 'possibly', and clarify precisely what these reasons are...When I say about active voice, I do not ask you to fill the gap in the sentence '____ killed the student'. We are still reporting on the act of finding the body, not on the act of the murder! And I am sure you can find out who found it."

Actually, no one seems to have included that information in any report I've been able to locate so far. I'm still trying to locate it if possible. At most all I can seem to locate in most of the reports is the use of pronoun-type language. This was a breaking report in the US as of the date I typed up the original article, and I still haven't seen much on it quite yet. And perhaps you could recommend a reliable crawler. (Bing and Google doesn't seem to be turning up much besides reprints of the same source.)

Further, A day old or so news story is not "stale" by any notion. How you come to that conclusion is a big ???.

But its largely irrelevant, because the story page still hits in the search engines.

ScruffMcGruff007 (talk) 01:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Google news knows the difference between published Wikinews articles and unpublished pages. So don't bother abusing the site with spam on the delusion you're "publishing news"; you're not. --Pi zero (talk) 02:32, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@ScruffMcGruff007: I feel that you are continuously ignoring comments by other editors. I do not like it. They are here for years. But in a way, you are disrespectful towards them. It won't be of any use it I try to explain you why to attribute and how to attribute, so here is the link.WN: Attribute. It would answer WHY?
acagastya 03:40, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

1. I have echo notifications disabled. You may continue to use @Gryllida: but it is better to use threaded discussions instead, in which a reply to a comment is indented with a colon. (I have refactored the discussion for this purpose. If you object, please do so immediately.)

   This is an example reply to the line above.

   Bye, thanks for the reply!

2. With attribution, we say both who said it and how they said it. This is because the very definition, and purpose, of attribution is "explicitly saying where information came from". There are two different reasons to attribute: to help the reader make informed judgements about controversial claims (was he really robbed off his credit card? really? Are we sure?), and to given credit where credit is due (thank you, victim's brother, for telling this information to whoever you told it to).

   An example:

   X was murdered. The national TV said he was also robbed.

   Here, the reader will immediately understand that the information didn't come to TV as a first source. The TV wasn't the first person to find out about the fact. The reader understands there was an additional entity which told this to the TV in some way (in this case, actually, through another entity: a witness told this to a news agency, and TV people read that news report and re-reported it.). It is immediately obvious that in writing it the way we wrote it, we hadn't explicitly said where the information came from. That's called slacking. The reporter is a slacker.

   For a reporter, not noticing this omission in the article at the time of writing is a shame; reporters usually don't like being accused of slacking, or of lying. Reporters have a passion for pulling every possible relevant bit of information to the open as accurately as possible. Furthermore, when told about it by a reviewer, a reporter would usually feel guilty and have a passion for fixing this immediately; not doing so and not having any desire to do so suggests it's probably not a good reporter. (That's not an insult. It's a thought to reflect on, and to adjust the mindset.)

3. Our main motto, as displayed at the top of the Newsroom, is "Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news.". This is supported by an elaborate set of guidelines guiding the freshness of our material. You don't report on events which happened over a year ago; similarly, for precisely the same reasons, we don't report on events which happened more than 3 days ago. These reasons do not include readership statistics or desire to be crawled by a search engine; they merely are because of the fact no longer being news, and Wikinews not being a soap box or an encyclopedia.

--Gryllida 04:20, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Review of revision 4231372 [Passed]

Revision 4231372 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 19:22, 8 July 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Had much difficulty with verification on this, perhaps partly because of the tumultuous writing history of the article, but also the ANSA source just stops in the middle of a sentence (in fact, another source when referring to the ANSA article ascribes details to it that aren't in the available fragment). When updating an article like this, it's good to introduce information of a definitely later provenance and mention that later date, preferably in the lede if feasible. 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 4231372 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 19:22, 8 July 2016 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Had much difficulty with verification on this, perhaps partly because of the tumultuous writing history of the article, but also the ANSA source just stops in the middle of a sentence (in fact, another source when referring to the ANSA article ascribes details to it that aren't in the available fragment). When updating an article like this, it's good to introduce information of a definitely later provenance and mention that later date, preferably in the lede if feasible. 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.