Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Most of the information was extracted from Spanish sources, however, I have added 2 English sources that may corroborate some of the information I have written. The translation should be somewhat poor, so I would appreciate it if someone with Spanish-English knowledge improved it from the original article before the article was reviewed. File:Alvaro Molina.pngAlvaro Molina(Let's Talk)02:41, 27 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
The biggest difficulty here is the language barrier (as the submitter anticipated; alas). There appear to be some difficulties also because of different practices between Spanish Wikinews and English Wikinews.
I really wanted this to work out. The story seems to me to be highly newsworthy, and I don't think US mainstream media have covered it very well. Unfortunately, the difficulties of working with Spanish sources has defeated me. To illustrate, here are problems I found in the introductory three paragraphs:
It seems very natural that in a situation like this, firefighters throughout the entire country would be mobilized — but I didn't successfully find this verified in the sources. I can't allow it simply because it makes sense to me; if it makes sense to me from the situation, and if the situation is presented to our readers, then they can figure it out just as well as I could. Our goal is to present our readers with facts we can verify from the sources, and leave further inferences to them. I also found that "several fire and brigade companies" seems to relate to a passage in one of the Spanish sources that says "bomberos y brigadistas" — that would be, firefighters and... something that sounds similar to the English word "brigade" but, as best I can figure, means something different and I'm not sure what it means. And, I was unable to locate in the sources (of either language) anything that talked about numbers of companies. Btw, I thought I'd seen something in one of the sources about large numbers of firefighters from outside the country coming to figure the first, which doesn't appear to be mentioned here; and I was somewhat surprised I didn't see anything about the total number of deaths, although some specific deaths are of course mentioned.
The second paragraph mentions that at least 150 thousand hectares have been consumed, but it doesn't say who said that or when, and in fact the number seems to have been going up rapidly; I think one of the sources mentions a number well over 200 thousand.
The third paragraph talks about causes of forest fires, but is worded in a way that does not make clear that (if I have understood rightly) the first part, about 99%, is about forest fires in general, while the rest of it is is conditions that exist in this particular case; and I believe all of it is a paraphrase (I'm not quite sure how close a paraphrase) of somebody, who is not named here — for English Wikinews, it should be attributed.
With that much difficulty just in the first three paragraphs, it's clear to me that if I tried to fix problems as I went along, I'd spend many (more) hours on this, probably not be able to fix all the problems, and quite possibly also disqualify myself from review by becoming too involved.
When using this many sources on an article, it would be very helpful to provide embedded html comments <!-- like this --> indicating where particular facts can be found.
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.
The biggest difficulty here is the language barrier (as the submitter anticipated; alas). There appear to be some difficulties also because of different practices between Spanish Wikinews and English Wikinews.
I really wanted this to work out. The story seems to me to be highly newsworthy, and I don't think US mainstream media have covered it very well. Unfortunately, the difficulties of working with Spanish sources has defeated me. To illustrate, here are problems I found in the introductory three paragraphs:
It seems very natural that in a situation like this, firefighters throughout the entire country would be mobilized — but I didn't successfully find this verified in the sources. I can't allow it simply because it makes sense to me; if it makes sense to me from the situation, and if the situation is presented to our readers, then they can figure it out just as well as I could. Our goal is to present our readers with facts we can verify from the sources, and leave further inferences to them. I also found that "several fire and brigade companies" seems to relate to a passage in one of the Spanish sources that says "bomberos y brigadistas" — that would be, firefighters and... something that sounds similar to the English word "brigade" but, as best I can figure, means something different and I'm not sure what it means. And, I was unable to locate in the sources (of either language) anything that talked about numbers of companies. Btw, I thought I'd seen something in one of the sources about large numbers of firefighters from outside the country coming to figure the first, which doesn't appear to be mentioned here; and I was somewhat surprised I didn't see anything about the total number of deaths, although some specific deaths are of course mentioned.
The second paragraph mentions that at least 150 thousand hectares have been consumed, but it doesn't say who said that or when, and in fact the number seems to have been going up rapidly; I think one of the sources mentions a number well over 200 thousand.
The third paragraph talks about causes of forest fires, but is worded in a way that does not make clear that (if I have understood rightly) the first part, about 99%, is about forest fires in general, while the rest of it is is conditions that exist in this particular case; and I believe all of it is a paraphrase (I'm not quite sure how close a paraphrase) of somebody, who is not named here — for English Wikinews, it should be attributed.
With that much difficulty just in the first three paragraphs, it's clear to me that if I tried to fix problems as I went along, I'd spend many (more) hours on this, probably not be able to fix all the problems, and quite possibly also disqualify myself from review by becoming too involved.
When using this many sources on an article, it would be very helpful to provide embedded html comments <!-- like this --> indicating where particular facts can be found.
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.
Thanks for the review, it is indeed a fact that is still under development (already 2 weeks have passed), and every day more and more the number of hectares increases, the style guide of the Spanish version of Wikinews mentions the use of the Stripes for explanation purposes about a term or as an alternative to parentheses in certain situations, here in the English version I believe they are used only to point out the author of a statement when quoting. It is a situation that being in full development, is updated every minute, so perhaps omitting those numbers (at least for now) would be better to avoid verifiability problems, in addition, most sources do not update their data, So that a source can always say, for example, 150 thousand hectares and the other 200 thousand hectares. With regard to the latter, I worry about including the comment arrow for the Spanish sources, although I will try to incorporate them with the English sources (although it may take some time). Regards. File:Alvaro Molina.pngAlvaro Molina(Let's Talk)23:32, 28 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
@AlvaroMolina: It doesn't seem right to omit important information because the area keeps growing. Specify who said it and when; then it remains true even if the area later grows (or if there is disagreement about what the area was at the time someone said that). If one wanted to, one could say something about how the number has been growing. --Pi zero (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
I have restored the data. I will put it to review for now if you need more improvements and see the possibility that at the latest tomorrow or the mole and possibly be published if there are no more errors. I will try to incorporate more information with the passage of the hours to avoid losing the freshness and the newsworthy. File:Alvaro Molina.pngAlvaro Molina(Let's Talk)00:06, 29 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
We've had short review availability for the past several days (I wish it were otherwise, but that's how the past few days have gone, and here we are now). Looking at the source dates, we've lost freshness again.
I notice, looking at the lede here, that it isn't describing a specific event, it's describing an ongoing situation. Even if I'd gotten to this sooner, that awkward fact would have been a problem. The whole article is trying to describe the whole big situation all at once, and by trying to do that, the article is making itself feel a bit encyclopedic. The headline here also shows this lack of sharp focus.
My suggestion would be to choose a specific event within this ongoing story, and build a less ambitious article from scratch around that. Introduce some background. That one article would be a smaller review task. In that way we could get an article covering a part of this. Then, once we've got one, we could do another, covering another specific event, and we could freely reuse any material from the previous article (as long as we list previous article under Related news), and perhaps introduce a bit more background. By taking things in small, manageable pieces like that, we could gradually build up a larger article than we could easily handle all at once. We could accomplish much more with many small steps than by trying to do it all in one big leap.
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.
We've had short review availability for the past several days (I wish it were otherwise, but that's how the past few days have gone, and here we are now). Looking at the source dates, we've lost freshness again.
I notice, looking at the lede here, that it isn't describing a specific event, it's describing an ongoing situation. Even if I'd gotten to this sooner, that awkward fact would have been a problem. The whole article is trying to describe the whole big situation all at once, and by trying to do that, the article is making itself feel a bit encyclopedic. The headline here also shows this lack of sharp focus.
My suggestion would be to choose a specific event within this ongoing story, and build a less ambitious article from scratch around that. Introduce some background. That one article would be a smaller review task. In that way we could get an article covering a part of this. Then, once we've got one, we could do another, covering another specific event, and we could freely reuse any material from the previous article (as long as we list previous article under Related news), and perhaps introduce a bit more background. By taking things in small, manageable pieces like that, we could gradually build up a larger article than we could easily handle all at once. We could accomplish much more with many small steps than by trying to do it all in one big leap.
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 see that a bunch of the material has been pulled out of this article and moved to another. However, I still see the same difficulties with focus and freshness.
Note that Related news should only refer to articles published before this one. So there's no way two articles can end up listing each other as related news.
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 see that a bunch of the material has been pulled out of this article and moved to another. However, I still see the same difficulties with focus and freshness.
Note that Related news should only refer to articles published before this one. So there's no way two articles can end up listing each other as related news.
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.
