User talk:Leighblackall

Archive

• 2009

Please stop being combative and put student learning ahead of whatever your objectives in community disruption are

Hi Leigh. I really appreciate your enthusiasm in assisting students. Your time perhaps would be better spent working with students to address the review criteria. Go through them with students on the talk page. Engage reviewers and ask what things we have noticed students need to work on to get things improved. Communication is a big problem here, and students are not communicating with reviewers, with reporters or others in the community. You are not assisting in this. Instead, you are appearing to engage in combative behavior that undermines student work and any learning objectives students may have. Please stop this behavior and instead focus on working with the community towards a shared goal of getting student content published. --LauraHale (talk) 04:02, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi Laura, you've jumped to a conclusion, and I'm frantically trying to explain and clarify. I'm having no end of trouble with the forum.. is this Liquid Threads? Luckily I copied my last draft to the clip board. Here it is pasted below, while I persist in trying to make the forum work for me:

Oh my goodness! I'm sorry you see it this way Pi zero. Please, pause a moment and 'assume good faith' while I explain what happened my side. I see that Laura Hale has jumped to a similar conclusion, so clearly I went wrong here, I hope my explanation goes someway to soothing both your concerns.

I saw Uowpjr's latest comment on it's own, not realising it was part of a longer discussion. I came to it via their Contributions log. I thought it was a message with no response, left my encouragement (not to the heckling but to keep trying to get an article up and that Wikinews is probably like any other news room). I then realised not only that I was not signed in, but that the comment was was part of a larger thread! Isn't Liquid Threads just glorious! When I saw that I wasn't signed in, I tried 3 times to correct my signature, but the software failed! You may notice via the Contributions on both my Username and the IP Address that the majority of my time around that comment was spent trying to capture all the student work thus far, into an up-to-date Category page.

I assure you, I have no beef with Wikinews. ANd when I said behind closed doors, I was referring to traditional news rooms - not Wikinews! That would be absurd. On rereading my comment, I can see how it mislead. My only excuse maybe that I had some heavy news about family land on me this morning, and my mind was partly elsewhere.

Like most of the other projects, I see them as having potentially significant value to formal education, and that the resources of formal education may be of use to the WM projects. You may be interested in looking at the work and the publication of the UoW project from 2011. Brian McNeil seems to be not available to support the UoW/Wikinews project this year, and a slightly concerning amount of discontent is coming from the student cohort this time around. On reviewing their work and reviews, I saw that a "UoW 2013 student work" category wasn't being used. I can see that you and Laura are doing the majority of the reviewing thus far, and that some of the comments (like mine here, and yours back) are too easily leading to conflict. Left unchecked, this may result in significant blow back on the all-too early stages of attempting to get UoW supporting Wikinews and other projects. I've asked David to communicate to his students to use the Category on their submissions, and to remind them of the volunteer nature of the reviewers work.

I hope my work to build a 2013 category is helpful, and that David's reminders will help ease some of the conflict. I hope my explanation here goes some way to reassuring you of my motives. Leighblackall (talk) 06:17, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

• Comments namespace? That's, as you guessed, LQT. Largely abandoned in-terms of development by the WMF, but the only comment solution available to Wikinews.

It's not treated like other namespaces, NPOV does not apply and people can have a good-old rant. Definitely not somewhere to do any student work.

Me? Yes, my time is painfully restricted due to work commitments; I'm working on a multi-million dollar telecom project which often sees me start at 8am and work through to 8pm, or later. I simply lack the attention-to-detail, and energy, to sit down after that and pour an hour or two into reviewing.

Then there's seeing off the project's detractors. They tried for closure of enWN on Meta; failing with that, a mass-sororicide attempt against all language-versions of Wikinews was started, with The Signpost used to try and drum up closure support from people who do not see the value of the project.

I read Laura's quick analysis of issues with student submissions, and it is something I'd hope students could take on-board.

If I allude to the closure nonsense, one of their gripes is Wikinews simply rehashes mainstream content; utterly failing to see that's how people get practice at presenting a story.

Right now, trying to get The Wikinewsie Group as an affiliate group is the most-important thing we can be doing. That will give us the clout to do things like chase Knight Foundation funding to provide real support to student work.

Nobody, and I mean that, nobody is setting out to make things impossible for UoW students (apart, naturally, from those trying to kill the project altogether). As I've seen in prior student submission projects the biggest hurdle they generally have to clear is recognising the biases and editorial decisions of mainstream news sources they tend to rely on; it's easy to hold up Fox News as an example of "how not to do news", but can they pick a handful of BBC, or VoA, stories and see what's wrong with them? What bad assumptions dent the credibility of their coverage?

With that said, I'm going back to my millions of phone lines... --Brian McNeil / ^talk 08:14, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

HI

Long time I didn't see you around. I was on and off at times — I clearly remember us doing some work during my first days or weeks here. It's good to see you around again. Welcome back! Gryllida 01:57, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Well thanks Gryllida, it was nice to recall our efforts to get the Glimategate story up. Unfortunately I've come a cropper in Wikinews again, after attempting to support the UoW 2013 Student Work project. Back to more quiet fields in Wikiversity and obscure Wikipedia pages for me I think. Leighblackall (talk) 06:10, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Reviewer status

Hello Leigh. I hear you are interested in a UoW student getting reviewer rights on English Wikinews. This would be something we would be keen to embrace as it would take tremendous strain off our reviewing load. In looking for a student candidate to support, please find one that has successfully gotten at least 2 stories published with no more than one not ready prior to publication. This demonstrates competency and that they have read the style guide. The student should also be able to demonstrate they have assisted their fellow students in getting work published. This demonstrates additional mastery of the style guide and understanding of the review criteria. These things will be key for getting community support. Once you have identified a student who meets this criteria encourage them to go to Wikinews:Flagged revisions/Requests for permissions and apply. --LauraHale (talk) 04:23, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Laura I will pass this information on to David (or simply point him here). One of the difficulties is fitting University rhythms and timeframes around real-world projects like Wikinews... but we can only try. Leighblackall (talk) 05:06, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I completely understand those rhythms. It might actually be a nice change of pace that instead of students learning how to get articles published, they instead learned how to critically evaluate them against review criteria and they worked towards reviewing articles by members of our community, assessing them against the style guide and the review criteria. This would likely meet with more success.  :) As English Wikinews is a small community, like English Wikiversity is, I would highly suggest that you make any and all discussions you have related to it public. :) Having these conversations in a public forum can make it easier for us to meet university rhythms, find local reviewers to assist on the ground, assist in developing instructional guides, etc.  :) Consulting with the community assists everyone. :) --LauraHale (talk) 18:46, 26 June 2013 (UTC)