Talk:Wikinews interviews Great Britain men's national wheelchair basketball player Joni Pollock

Journalist notes

Most of what there is can be found in the interview as this is a bit of a summary of that. The thing that can't is the start date for GB's Paralympic Campaign. That is here. Didn't include in the article as not so relevant though maybe. --LauraHale (talk) 01:20, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Written?

Shouldn't the interview be written down as well as being available in an audio format? --Rayboy8 (my talk) (my contributions) 13:54, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

• I think you'll better-understand the problems with that were you to sit down and try to transcribe 5 minutes. It's not an easy job, even for people who can type 100+ words-per-minute. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 21:28, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

What I meant was writing a transcript of the article for the Wikinews article to go alongside the audio recording, if you know what I mean. --Rayboy8 (my talk) (my contributions) 21:31, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I commented on this issue on each of the other two interviews belonging to the same 'set' as this one. Transcripts aren't always practical, but when they are, they're good for a variety of reasons, including neutrality (summarizing is borderline analysis) and accessibility (not to put too fine a point on it, some of our readers may be deaf). --Pi zero (talk) 21:36, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

• Rayboy8, I challenge you to do as-suggested above: Transcibe five minutes.

• Pi zero, Having run into the transcription problem myself, back when I interviewed Tony Benn, I know how valuable having a full transcript would be. There are technical measures you can employ to help with the transcription process; what I've done in the past is slow down the audio to half-speed and shift the pitch back up to where it was. This gives you the speakers talking slowly enough that you can transcribe a little better.

Even with techniques like this, you're realistically only going to be able to pull a fair collection of representative quotes to weave into a narrative. Doing that should reduce the summarising-as-almost-analysis problem. However, it then puts you under an obligation to go back to the interviewee and confirm they do not feel misrepresented.

I wish speech recognition was more reliable without training, and that someone would point me at a FOSS application for it (hint, hint). --Brian McNeil / ^talk 22:49, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Caption......

....beneath audio file needs fixing. Bddpaux (talk) 19:08, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Y'know........

....I'm not totally certain that I believe this whole-heartedly, but it seems a little funny for the audio recording to be on the article's main page. It's just always odd to me when news sources post a video or audio bit, and then write an article in the very same spot telling you what you just heard. It's weirdly redundant, silly even. Admittedly, a lot of your text is really a pretty summation of the interview, I'll concede that, but it just seems that the audio belongs as OR source. I'll bet a lot of people disagree with me simply because the audio adds an "Oh, look....neat!" aspect to things.......therefore in 2012, it must be fabulous and totally applicable because it's a new digital toy (not saying that wiki-audio is new, but it isn't seen in a lot of articles here). Bddpaux (talk) 19:14, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I verified the details with the cousin of one of the Australia men's national team players who was Pollock's room mate. The audio was included because it is pretty nigh on impossible to transcribe the thing. It isn't a new toy, but rather a way to better convey the interview to people who might be interested in it. Having the audio is no different in this case than transcribing an interview. I'm honestly really confused about this statement. Why wouldn't you put the audio interview on the article if you have it? I look at similar news pieces done by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. They have the interview, and about four sentences explaining what the interview is. That is their article. --LauraHale (talk) 23:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

See, what you just said in the last sentence there strikes a loud chord with what I've tried to say here (but have struggled to put into words) several times. I like to say this a lot in life: "Whatever you do, it's important that you always clearly define the thing." My wife, understandably, gets tired of hearing it. So, OK.....you've got an audio interview.....great, cool.....sounds nice. But then you have this cleaned up, nicely sterilized article that "farms" stuff from the audio interview. So, what is the thing here (in this article, I mean)? Am I, the reader, suppose to listen to an audio interview? ....or, am I supposed to read the article? Sure, I can do both.....perfectly fun and perfectly fine. But Pi Zero touched on earlier, that, to do a nice chatty interview and then to write a nice article based upon that begins to skirt very closely to analysis........and we don't do that here. We report the news. That's what we do here. So, to me, the audio should go onto the talk page, because that nice little piece of print journalism is "backed up" by the audio interview. And, not to miss it, I'd have ZERO PROBLEMS with "an article" being an audio interview file with a couple of sentences (like you mentioned up top).....but that's not what we've got here. Product-wise, we've actually got two BIG THINGS here. --Bddpaux (talk) 01:29, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• Who we interviewing? Why is talking to them newsworthy? What makes listening to the audio worthwhile? Chuck in when and, as Laura says, you need little more than a handful of sentences.

Sell it to readers/listeners with a couple of good pulled quotes fromthe audio. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 01:38, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• I'm TOTALLY WITH YOU 100% and I did a horribly sloppy job of trying to convey my desire to see more of that here recently. I think articles where, the audio or video is 94% of the whole product sounds awesome! You see that kind of stuff on CNN (etc. etc. etc. etc.) all the time. My point was simply that, the way this is formatted, both the audio and the print are BIG PLAYERS ON A SMALL STAGE. --Bddpaux (talk) 02:16, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Review of revision 1564784 [Not ready]

Revision 1564784 of this article has been reviewed by Bddpaux (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 19:28, 24 July 2012 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: see below Comments by reviewer: Change audio file caption (please see my comment about the audio interview, but that was just my opinion -- and one that I'm not even sure I believe in whole-heartedly). Carefully read the first sentence on para 3......huh? Couldn't get lined up properly on that. ....and, last but not least Pardon my snittiness, but this "use to have them" business smacks of middle-schooler-esque sloppiness. The 4th paragraph is just tired and sketchy in general. The final sentence in the article.....should probably just go. I tried to help a lot on para 1, but the whole article needs a good hard re-read. 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 1564784 of this article has been reviewed by Bddpaux (talk · contribs) and found not ready at 19:28, 24 July 2012 (UTC). Copyright: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. NPOV: Not reviewed. Please address other issues. Style: Not ready: see below Comments by reviewer: Change audio file caption (please see my comment about the audio interview, but that was just my opinion -- and one that I'm not even sure I believe in whole-heartedly). Carefully read the first sentence on para 3......huh? Couldn't get lined up properly on that. ....and, last but not least Pardon my snittiness, but this "use to have them" business smacks of middle-schooler-esque sloppiness. The 4th paragraph is just tired and sketchy in general. The final sentence in the article.....should probably just go. I tried to help a lot on para 1, but the whole article needs a good hard re-read. 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.

I take offence to "smacks of middle-schooler-esque sloppiness", this was written after a long day at the wheelchair basketball championships and late at night. I don't have the time to do any further work on it at the moment as I've got other things which need to be done and they can't wait. Bidgee (talk) 23:22, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to echo bidgee here regarding "business smacks of middle-schooler-esque sloppiness". This is constructive feedback that will help with resubmitting the article... how? If you received such feedback from a reviewer and you wanted to get an article published, what do you think the statement "business smacks of middle-schooler-esque sloppiness" would mean in terms of improving the article? Based on that feedback, what would you change to improve the article for publication? --LauraHale (talk) 23:47, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I looked at the last sentence. The article is written in a pyramid style, with the least important facts going at the bottom. This is an important, but not the most important by a long shot, part of knowing about this person in the context of the interview. Which fact would you suggest in writing using the pyramid style writing to put last? --LauraHale (talk) 23:49, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Later this evening maybe, I'm hoping I might do a copyedit pass through the article. I've gotten some practice at repairing grammatical difficulties with just tiny tweaks, maintaining independence for review. That might help us see more clearly how to move forward, at least with this particular article. --Pi zero (talk) 00:59, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• Yes, it may not be particularly constructive feedback, if you pick out that particular comment. We've all written grammatically atrocious stuff when particularly tired. We should all, equally, know how hard it can be to figure out how to fix such.

If there's an intent to push it as an audio report, that's a different matter — and something I don't think we've had anyone do previously.

I'm going to leave my comments at that, as I'm particularly tired too. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 01:33, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

You know what matters most here?

We've got reporters on the ground doing GREAT WORK and a very important thing.....that's what matters most. Regarding things said (in both directions), I care about good journalism and making Wikinews do what it does best......therefore, my apologies in multiple directions. I'm gonna do a bit of concrete c/e on this article and others can do with it as they see fit. Again, there's good stuff going on over there and that's what matters most. --Bddpaux (talk) 01:15, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Please, please, please

Carefully read and re-read my edits to paragraphs 3 and 4. I went back (over and over) to the audio to try to make sure I was getting things right. I shortened up lots of sentences to try to increase cohesion. I don't want to've messed with/or messed up on any critical facts, though, and you guys were on the ground. In shortening some of the sentences, I could've chopped out (even just one or two words somewhere) that really matter. --Bddpaux (talk) 02:13, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Article status

I've made copyedits throughout, but nothing I'd consider beyond the purview of an independent reviewer — so I am, I believe, still qualified to review this. Except, of course, that it's after midnight where I am, and I'm exhausted, so I couldn't do a review without getting a night's sleep first.

Although I could rattle off things one of the writers (as opposed to reviewers) could do to improve the article, I'm inclined to think if it passes a verification source-check, it's probably publishable now. And we can consider therafter what we've learned from all this, and what we can do to make the review-and-publication of interviews like this run more smoothly, and produce as good a product as possible. --Pi zero (talk) 04:22, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Review of revision 1565707 [Passed]

Revision 1565707 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 19:21, 25 July 2012 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Keeping in mind that we're looking to continually improve our handling of this form of article, here are a couple of thoughts. Some direct quotes from the interviewee would help. They would relieve the person writing it up of some responsibility for interpreting what was said, strengthening accuracy and neutrality; and they'd add color and a human element. It would be good to include a few words in the text acknowledging there's other stuff in the interview that isn't in the text. Each such article has to decide where to strike its balance between text and audio, and the acknowledgement of additional audio material is part of that balance; in brianmc's example, the text is quite minimal and mentions "Speaking at-length on a wide range of topics", which is pretty far toward the audio end of the spectrum; we're not that far along here, but still, there are some interesting points in the audio that aren't in the text. It could be useful to a reviewer, in a case such as this, to use html comments in the text to note where (i.e., when) on the audio to find particular information. In this case I didn't note down just where various information occurs on the audio tape; it was mostly pretty straightforward, except that while most of the third paragraph, about being loud in the preceding game, occurs early in the audio, the bit about not coming to Australia on a Parlaympic year is in a different place, at 7:00. 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 1565707 of this article has been reviewed by Pi zero (talk · contribs) and has passed its review at 19:21, 25 July 2012 (UTC). Copyright: Passed Newsworthiness: Passed Verifiability: Passed NPOV: Passed Style: Passed Comments by reviewer: Keeping in mind that we're looking to continually improve our handling of this form of article, here are a couple of thoughts. Some direct quotes from the interviewee would help. They would relieve the person writing it up of some responsibility for interpreting what was said, strengthening accuracy and neutrality; and they'd add color and a human element. It would be good to include a few words in the text acknowledging there's other stuff in the interview that isn't in the text. Each such article has to decide where to strike its balance between text and audio, and the acknowledgement of additional audio material is part of that balance; in brianmc's example, the text is quite minimal and mentions "Speaking at-length on a wide range of topics", which is pretty far toward the audio end of the spectrum; we're not that far along here, but still, there are some interesting points in the audio that aren't in the text. It could be useful to a reviewer, in a case such as this, to use html comments in the text to note where (i.e., when) on the audio to find particular information. In this case I didn't note down just where various information occurs on the audio tape; it was mostly pretty straightforward, except that while most of the third paragraph, about being loud in the preceding game, occurs early in the audio, the bit about not coming to Australia on a Parlaympic year is in a different place, at 7:00. 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.