Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
Whoever reviews this (whether I or someone else) needs to work out exactly which passages are and are not actually direct quotes. The quotation marks don't match up, so I'm unsure even which passages are meant to be direct quotes. This can be untangled by the reviewer, of course, but will require care. --Pi zero (talk) 17:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
I've tried to fix the direct quotes. -- CalF (talk) 18:19, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
There's a paragraph I can't verify, a sentence containing an NPOV violation (presenting a controversial claim as fact), and a bunch of things too close to the sources. At least some of these things I could fix, individually anyhow, but they all add up to too much for a reviewer to maintain independence.
The fifth paragraph, about China, I've been unable to verify. My guess is, this is contained in the BBC source's highlights video about China, but unfortunately that video appears not to be working (wasn't for me, anyway).
The first sentence of the third paragraph, "Mr Romney criticized Mr Obama's proposed military budget cuts", is a WN:NPOV violation because, as I understand Obama's comments, he maintains he isn't proposing military budget cuts.
In providing distance from source, the most superficial rule of thumb is to avoid more than three consecutive words identical to source, with obvious exceptions like names and titles. The first two sentences of the fourth paragraph (the "apology" paragraph) contain much longer verbatim strings. (There's also another passage later in the paragraph that, technically, just barely exceeds this by being four consecutive words, but that sentence is of more concern for another reason, below.)
It isn't enough to avoid long verbatim sequences. Changing a few words to "synonyms" won't do either, if it's a longer passage. Sentence structure and phrase structure should be changed if possible, and ideally there would be a different factoring of information into sentences — Wikinews sentences would have bits from different source sentences, and source sentences would get bits distributed into different Wikinews sentences.
The second paragraph has a lot of this sort of closeness to source; the only part really immune is the long direct quote. The fourth paragraph has some too. Note that when one has a direct quote, as a matter of course one ought to avoid using exactly the same framing for it. In stead of 'Mr X said, "Foobar."', one might say '"Foorbar", Mr X remarked.' Or the like. Longer quotes provide more opportunity for rearranging the framing. The second paragraph contains a couple of direct quotes that are framed with "he said" after them, which is identical to their framing in the source, and really that sort of thing is straightforward enough to change that there's not a good reason not to change it.
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.
There's a paragraph I can't verify, a sentence containing an NPOV violation (presenting a controversial claim as fact), and a bunch of things too close to the sources. At least some of these things I could fix, individually anyhow, but they all add up to too much for a reviewer to maintain independence.
The fifth paragraph, about China, I've been unable to verify. My guess is, this is contained in the BBC source's highlights video about China, but unfortunately that video appears not to be working (wasn't for me, anyway).
The first sentence of the third paragraph, "Mr Romney criticized Mr Obama's proposed military budget cuts", is a WN:NPOV violation because, as I understand Obama's comments, he maintains he isn't proposing military budget cuts.
In providing distance from source, the most superficial rule of thumb is to avoid more than three consecutive words identical to source, with obvious exceptions like names and titles. The first two sentences of the fourth paragraph (the "apology" paragraph) contain much longer verbatim strings. (There's also another passage later in the paragraph that, technically, just barely exceeds this by being four consecutive words, but that sentence is of more concern for another reason, below.)
It isn't enough to avoid long verbatim sequences. Changing a few words to "synonyms" won't do either, if it's a longer passage. Sentence structure and phrase structure should be changed if possible, and ideally there would be a different factoring of information into sentences — Wikinews sentences would have bits from different source sentences, and source sentences would get bits distributed into different Wikinews sentences.
The second paragraph has a lot of this sort of closeness to source; the only part really immune is the long direct quote. The fourth paragraph has some too. Note that when one has a direct quote, as a matter of course one ought to avoid using exactly the same framing for it. In stead of 'Mr X said, "Foobar."', one might say '"Foorbar", Mr X remarked.' Or the like. Longer quotes provide more opportunity for rearranging the framing. The second paragraph contains a couple of direct quotes that are framed with "he said" after them, which is identical to their framing in the source, and really that sort of thing is straightforward enough to change that there's not a good reason not to change it.
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.
Another small (but significant) problem is the characterization of the poll as "saying" that such-and-such percent of "voters" think so-and-so. Iirc, the source that mentioned the specific results of that poll said the poll suggested that about voters. The trouble is that the poll can't know about all voters, it can only give results that are interpreted as a statistically significant indication about what the overall population of voters think. --Pi zero (talk) 02:11, 24 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
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.
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.
