User talk:Nuams

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 19:18, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Amsterdam to invest in affordable housing

Hello. There is a problem with this article. The sources are in Dutch, and nobody understands Dutch. If you could

1. Replace them with English sources (or)
2. Translate the Dutch sources to English manually

it would do.
acagastya PING ME! 10:28, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

There are some things that make this situation more complicated.

• Sometimes a reviewer manages to deal with non-English sources in a language the reviewer isn't at all fluent in. It depends on a lot of things, like how complex is the information that is being extracted from the source, how well we know the reporter, how much the reviewer has dealt with the source-language, how similar to English the source-language is (some European languages are pretty similar, though others are less so). There can be real problems in trying, though; there can be idioms and nuances that no non-fluent reviewer would even know were there. (I once coped with a Spanish-language source, only to find out later in conversation with someone whose first language was Spanish that that Spanish-language source appeared, from its overall style, to be a press release. Which would have mattered hugely to my treatment of the source, and perhaps to my treatment of the whole review, if I had known; but only a native speaker of Spanish would ever have known that the overall tone of that source indicated "press release".)
• Rather than replacing sources with English ones, add English sources. Sources that were actually used in writing the article should stay on the list of sources.
• We cannot host a full translation of a copyrighted source on the wiki: a translation retains all the copyright restrictions of the original, plus whatever additional restrictions might be imposed by the translator. There are a couple of ways to deal with that:

• It might be possible to provide translation notes on the article talk page, translating a few key passages, and/or discussing overall concerns with translation of the sources.
• A more extensive translation, that cannot be hosted on the wiki, could be sent to the scoop mailing list — "scoop at wikinewsie dot org".

--Pi zero (talk) 11:11, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback acagastya and Pi zero. This is the first time I posted an article on the English version of wikinews. I appreciate the thorough review process (and the work you people do to make it happen). At the same time, the requirement to translate sources creates a pretty high barrier for posting stories on news from the Netherlands (in many cases the only sources in English, if any, will be websites targeting expats that use the same Dutch sources I’m using). For my information, has it been considered using google translate to check non-English sources? Nuams (talk) 17:28, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

The thing is: machine translation has often resulted in saying things opposite to what it means. For checking English Sources, of we do that, we are no longer uninvolved reviewers, and so we won't be able to review it. I could have done it, but due to real life problems at the moment, I wouldn't be able to. I am sorry for that. I know first contribution means a lot, and I know that feeling. I hope you would look for some English sources for the next time. I hope I could be more helpful from the next time you write an article. But, I think @George Ho: or @Numbermaniac: can find sources for this article. George Ho, numbermaniac, could you please take care of this? I would try to review it tomorrow, and I hope the article won't lose freshness.
acagastya PING ME! 17:52, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: I've found two English-language articles that verify almost all the statements in the article. Make sure to check the comments - there are some minor discrepancies here and there. -- numbermaniac 02:38, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for checking the sources numbermaniac. I’m not sure whether this is the right place to respond? As for the rise in house prices: Parool says 'over 21%' whereas Dutchnews says 'some 20%' - I guess a safe approach would be to use the latter? As for the publication date of the NLTimes article, it might actually be correct: on 22 June the city government issued a press release announcing the Housing Agenda (https://www.amsterdam.nl/bestuur-organisatie/college/individuele-paginas/lau-rens/persberichten/amsterdam-gaat-80/), but it wasn't adopted by the city council until about a month later.

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From what I could understand, it came into effect on Wednesday night -- and today is the fourth day, so it is no longer fresh. I am really sorry.
acagastya PING ME! 10:12, 23 July 2017 (UTC)