Template talk:Stale

Let's change the wording

• WN:CG says "Ensure your reporting is timely and the story is at most a week old with sources in the last 2–3 days.", but
• Template:Stale says "Wikinews does not publish reports on events that have happened three or more days ago."

These conflict. As the content guide is approved policy/guideleine, I suggest we reword the template to "Wikinews only publishes fresh stories." Several good stories today fell foul of the two day limit in the template, (as a result of very low levels of reviewer activity) even in at least one case the print sources would be just two days old.

Current practice seems to be a three day limit, (rarely a week) and I suggest we start a Water Cooler conversation aimed at eventually tightening the limits in WN:CG

--InfantGorilla (talk) 15:47, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Stale articles may still be valid

This conversation has been marked for the community's attention. Please remove the {{flag}} when the discussion is complete or no longer important.

I propose the first sentence of this template be removed. The first sentence says the validity of the article is disputed. But a two-week-old story from, say CNN can still be valid, authentic, and genuine. It's just too old for our standards of WN:FRESH.

I also propose that we set it up similar to {{abandoned}} such that it marks the article for deletion automatically in two days. That means adding verbiage to the header as well. I don't think it needs to be in red, or in a warning style. The goal being to automate the next step so that we don't have to go back and mark the article a second time if it isn't edited otherwise.

The new verbiage could be something like the following:

Wikinews does not publish reports on events that are not sufficiently recent. For synthesis articles, new details must have come to light within the past five to seven days, and the news event itself must have happened within ten days. Unless sources can be found and a news event chosen to bring this article into compliance with those requirements, the article will be deleted on April 28 (2 days). See the guideline on Gatwicking for guidance.

Exceptions are possible where original reporting adds significant new and newsworthy information to the article.

Note! Administrators carrying out cleanup work should take great care with items where original reporting is involved. Such should be moved to the original contributors' userspace, and a courtesy link to it added to their talk page.

Please try to resolve objections on the discussion page, or move the article to Wikipedia or another sister project where it may be more relevant.

Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:06, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

This is really a result of the messy transition from a two-to-three day staleness window to a five-to-seven day window in 2022. Previously, the abandonment process's four-days-without-editing requirement worked nicely to ensure every article {{abandoned}} got applied to was already stale, and so {{stale}} was not really needed (note how the documentation lists {{tasks}} and {{abandoned}} as preferred alternatives). I guess the simpler solution would be to just require eight days without editing before articles are considered abandoned. Heavy Water (talk) 16:43, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Easier solution. Require 4 days without editing, but you can not put {{subst:aband}} on a non-stale article. I do agree with the new verbiage more or less though, however I would not support making it deleted in 2 days without Gatiwcking, which can sometimes take a while. A stale article does us no harm. @Heavy Water@Michael.C.Wright Me Da Wikipedian (talk) 17:56, 18 June 2024 (UTC)