Follow Wikinews'structure? for articles, answering as many of who what when where why and how? as you can; summarised in a short, two- or three-sentence opening paragraph. Once complete, your article must be three or more paragraphs.
If you need help, you can add {{helpme}} to your talkpage, along with a question, or alternatively, just ask?
Use this tab to enter your title and get a basic article template. [RECOMMENDED. Starts your article through the semi-automated {{develop}}—>{{review}}—>{{publish}} collaboration process.]
Welcome! 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.
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.
Wiki projects work because a sense of community forms around the project. Although writing news is far more individualistic than contributing to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, people often need minor help with things like spelling and copyediting. If a story isn't too old you might be able to expand it, or if it is disputed you may be able to find some more sources and rescue it before it is listed for deletion.
There are always discussions going on about how the site could be improved, and your input is of value. Check the links here to see where you can give input to the running of the Wikinews project.
Use the following box to help you create your first article. Simply type in a title to your story and press "Create page". Then start typing text to your story into the new box that will come up. When you're done, press "save page". That's all there is to it!
It is recommended you read the article guide before starting. Also make sure to check the list of recently created articles to see if your story hasn't already been reported upon.
Everyone who's new to Wikinews remind yourselves of the article guide and style guide. And, use the Enter an article tab in this template to correctly start your competition articles.
Possibly the fastest way to get help is to look for the regulars in the #wikinews IRC channel on Freenode. See this page for more details. Remember, many people will lurk, connected long-term, but not regularly checking for messages. Please be patient when looking for answers to queries, it can be annoying to see someone ask a question but leave before you notice it.
Use this form to create a competition-ready article. Be sure to check the Main page and Newsroom to see you're not creating a duplicate. Please also add your article and point score to the log so that your score can be counted.
Newsletter compiled and written by Tristan Thomas. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 111 articles.
This Week
Brian McNeil reports on the first week; as the instigator and main organiser of the competition, he has a large interest in its continuing success.
Wikinews' 2010 writing contest got off to a brisk start this week with entrants scheming to have the first post-midnight submission.
A particularly high number of barely-qualifying articles on the first day saw a notable record sent for the most articles published in one day since the introduction of Flagged Revisions.
Tristan Thomas upped the stakes on the second day of competition with an original reporting interview scoring 26 points and moving him near the top of the leaderboard with only one article, as-compared to others prolifically contributing short 3-point articles.
Reviewing is, at the moment, the most problematic issue with the competition. This can be as time-consuming as the actual creation of an article when copyediting for active voice, formatting per the style guide, and reading all cited sources. Competition entrants are strongly advised to ensure their browser supports a spell-checker; beware developing offline with a word processor that uses 'smart quotes' and other nonstandard characters; only cite the sources needed; review all copyedit changes to their articles done during, and after, the review process; and, to ensure they are very familiar with the style guide.
With only thirteen competitors on the scoreboard at the end of the first week, where are all the entrants? Comprehensive and in-depth submissions could easily change the leader positions. The current top five are Tempodivalse, Dendodge, Bencherlite, Pmlineditor and Microchip08.
Newsletter compiled and written by Tristan Thomas. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 145 articles.
This Week
Tempodivalse reports on the second week of the competition. He is the current leader on both points and articles.
Well, we're now about two weeks into the contest. The initial "flurry" of activity has now subsided significantly, and we've settled down to an output of about ten articles per day, down from 25-30 articles in the first few days of the competition. That's less than I had hoped, and a lot of the 31 original sign-ups have yet to write anything, but I can't complain; we've attracted at least half a dozen new contributors to the project, such as Microchip08 and Wizardman, who are doing a great job expanding our coverage.
The point scoring system was designed to encourage in-depth articles, rather than a mass of stubs, and it shows: I estimate our average article size to have increased by several paragraphs, which I believe is good, as it helps encourage casual readers to stay on the site and read more.
I'm in the lead at the moment, and I admit that the gap from first to second place - and especially second to third - is fairly large, but I don't want that to discourage participants (as it appears several people have been). It's not as big a gap as it seems, and two or so in-depth articles would easily bring 50-60 points, placing one well within striking distance. Plus, there are still another ten weeks left, ample time to catch up.
Newsletter compiled and written by Mikemoral. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 173 articles.
This Week
Dendodge comments for this newsletter. He is currently ranked 2nd in the competition.
As we approach the fourth week of the contest, the activity levels have decreased greatly compared to the first few days, and we are now down to between five and ten articles per day. I can't claim to have helped the situation—I haven't written anything for about a week. I'm not complaining, however, as I have somehow managed to stay in second place. While this may make the gaps between competitors seem too large to overcome, it should take only a couple of in-depth articles to overtake me. In fact, with so much time left, I wouldn't even rule out somebody knocking Tempodivalse down into second place!
The articles we are getting are still relatively in-depth, though much shorter than at the beginning of the contest. Remember, in-depth articles mean we can better compete with the mainstream media (and they're worth more points!).
I have also noticed a widening of our geographical and categorical coverage. While we used to cover mainly US and Western Europe, with particular focus on "important" issues such as politics, we have now branched out (probably out of desperation to find more points!)
Finally, I would like to thank everybody for their participation, and wish you all the best of luck.
Newsletter compiled and written by Mikemoral. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 173 articles.
This Week
Rayboy8 comments for this newsletter. He is currently ranked 2nd in the competition.
There have been some significant changes to the leaderboard over the last couple of weeks. One of the main changes is the fact that five more entrants for the competition have now started to create articles for the contest, meaning that five more users have now gone onto the leaderboard. The total number of competitors on the list was 20 the last time I checked. One user in particular, known by the name of C628, appears to have performed particularly persistently recently, going from not being on the leaderboard at all to climbing all the way up to seventh place. On a separate note, I also managed to reach second place recently, surpassing Dendodge's total. This shows you just what you can achieve if you put enough effort into writing articles over a certain period of time. Remember, it is still perfectly possible to build up a score that is higher than Tempodivalse's! I wish all of our competitors the very best of luck for the next month and a bit.
Newsletter compiled and written by Mikemoral. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 257 articles.
Tempodivalse comments for this newsletter. He is the winner of the competition.
Well, the three-month contest has finally drawn to a close. I must admit I've been somewhat disappointed with the results. Despite advertising it heavily, we didn't have nearly as many new users or as much news coverage as I had hoped, and closer to the end it completely faltered, so I didn't have any competition for first prize. Maybe there's something we can learn from this, though: instead of doing very long competitions hosted occasionally, we should perhaps have multiple shorter (i.e., week-long) contests spread out throughout the year - which may encourage more heavy editing. One thing I think we should keep for any future comps is the scoring system - which worked really well and encouraged in-depth writing, in my opinion.
The contest was still pretty fun overall, though. Congratulations to user:Rayboy8 and user:Pmlineditor for taking second and third places, respectively. Thanks to everyone for participating, and especially to User:Brian McNeil for offering to host it and come up with most of the rules.
