Comments from WMF and discoverer?
Can we get comments from WMF and from the discoverer for a followup? - David Gerard (talk) 23:49, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
What's the news angle? Before approaching anyone about an interview, one should be very confident the result will be newsworthy. Although much of our best work is interviews (two out three currently open FACs, for instance), it is possible for an interview to fail newsworthiness, and it's bad if one approaches someone for an interview and then it doesn't get published.
Although Wikinews is not against covering wikimedia-related stories; we've done so from time to time; we are very circumspect about it because of our potential COI and our need to maintain independence for neutrality — we mustn't become a "wikimedia newsletter". We won't give wikimedia-internal content a "free pass" on newsworthiness. For example, when en.wp passes X number of edits or number of articles or number of featured articles or the like, that's not necessarily newsworthy — though one might choose on the occasion to do some sort of interview, that might achieve newsworthiness on its own (substantially independent of X).
An interview with the discoverer of the asteroid —let's suppose any language barrier could be overcome— might be a science interview, covering their astronomical work broadly, including their asteroid work. Sure it could touch on the naming, but that wouldn't be a big part of the interview. And comment from wikimedians wouldn't fit into that article.
Do you have a picture in mind of how this would work? What's the news angle?
I'm just thinking of what I might expect as a casual reader of this story ... guess we'll see if the story hits the media echo chamber!
I see what you mean, I think. Those things would have made nice accoutrements to the basic article (which as reviewer I judged newsworthy on the very basic grounds that it seemed interesting in a news-y sort of way). But one of the daunting things about news is the deadlines; this is what we were able to put together and get through the process quickly. So it's too late to do something within the original article, and something else would have to achieve newsworthiness on its own.