User talk:Brittany

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Welcome, Brittany! Thank you for joining Wikinews; we'd love for you to stick around and get more involved. To help you get started we have an essay that will guide you through the process of writing your first full article. There are many other things you can do on the project, but its lifeblood is new, current, stories written neutrally. As you get more involved, you will need to look into key project policies and other discussions you can participate in; so, keep this message on this page and refer to the other links in it when you want to learn more, or have any problems. Wikipedia's puzzle-globe logo, © Wikimedia Foundation   Used to contributing to Wikipedia? See here.

All Wikimedia projects have rules. Here are ours. Listed here are the official policies of the project, you may be referred to some of them if your early attempts at writing articles don't follow them. Don't let this discourage you, we all had to start somewhere. The rules and guides laid out here are intended to keep content to high standards and meet certain rules the Wikimedia Foundation applies to all projects. It may seem like a lot to read, but you do not have to go through it all in one sitting, or know them all before you can start contributing. Remember, you should enjoy contributing to the project. If you're really stuck come chat with the regulars. There's usually someone in chat who will be happy to help, but they may not respond instantly.

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-- 04:51, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Timeliness

Hia! I just saw your article on prison torture. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to meet Wikinews' requirement for a news article to be timely. News has to be 'new' by definition (new is part of the word, after all;)). If a story is more than a few days old, it ceases to be news and becomes encyclopedic content. At that point the information in the article should be added to Wikipedia rather than Wikinews.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that your writing needs to go to waste. There may well be updates in the prison torture scandal story that would warrant the creation of a new article. When that happens, a lot of the material that you wrote for this story could likely be used as background material for that new article. (Just think, when you read a BBC article, you get 1 paragraph about recent developments, and the rest of the article is background information. That applies here too.)

I've moved the article in question to your userspace here, along with the associated talk page. That will save it from deletion, and allow you to reuse most of your work when updates to this story happen. Gopher65_talk 22:06, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Also, please consider reading this short help page about article writing. It gives some great advise that will help you get your articles published in a quick and timely fashion. Gopher65_talk 22:17, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Manually editing templates

Hi! I just saw your edit on the Bahrain story, where you manually edited the tasks template, ultimately leaving a broken template behind. In future, if you want to move the story back to review, after changing it, simply click the "Change" button in the tasks box, and the system will make the necessary changes for you. Regards, BarkingFish (talk) 00:42, 10 April 2011 (UTC)