User talk:Peter Chastain

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Again, Peter Chastain, welcome to Wikinews! Greatly appreciate your attention to detail, and that you know where (in what place) to ask questions. --Gryllida (talk) 05:02, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

<chiming in> Indeed; welcome. Another link you might find useful (not provided currently on the welcome template, which we almost never touch since it's transcluded on an insane number of pages) is Wikinews:Pillars of writing, which I put together some years ago by augmenting a kernel of remarks polished smooth by being written on hundreds if not thousands of times in review comments. --Pi zero (talk) 11:29, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Article suggestion

I don't have any articles planned for today (as of now). Can you suggest some news articles? Don't worry about the type of article, just let me know about the event and I would try my best.
•–• 11:51, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Thanks for reaching out to me. I am new here, and still getting the feel for what kinds of articles are apropos. Investigations of Trump and his administration are always fresh because of their ongoing nature, but I haven't seen stories here—is that because they are huge and well covered everywhere else? Other possibilities:

• Possible evidence that Korea continues to build nuclear weapons
• Dog saliva leads to amputation: Definite clickbait—is this too sensationalistic? Capnocytophaga canimorsus is nearly omnipresent in the gums of dogs and cats, but susceptibility in humans is quite rare.
• Cyclospora cayetanensis in some U.S. grocery products I think public-health news is important but am not sure that something like this (local in nature) is interesting to a global audience.
• QAnon conspiracy theory I haven't read the story yet—it's kind of long in the Washington Post—but there seems to be a lot of chatter on television. Not sure it can be boiled down into something short enough for WikiNews. Is this the kind of analysis that should be left to Wikipedia?

Those are just a few ideas. Not sure they are useful, since it's getting a bit late in your day. If you are interested in any of this but have trouble with the Washington Post paywall, I can go into more detail. If you have time, I would appreciate feedback, by way of helping me understand how things work here. Thanks. Peter Chastain (talk) 20:07, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh, don't worry about my time zone, I really don't stick to it. By the way, I would suggest you to join the irc channel #wikinewsie-group on freenode. You should find pizero and me (I use my username as the nick, acagastya). If a newbie can communicate with reviewers at the early stages, they can pick up things rapidly.
103.254.128.86 (talk) 22:06, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Info: WN:IRC. Gryllida (talk) 22:34, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi. Re freshness, breaking stories —that is, stories that are continuing to change— are more difficult for us, with our review model. Heavily covered stories are also more difficult for us to cover well, and even if not breaking they tend to go stale a bit faster in practice because everybody knows about them and they just feel like old news sooner. We tend to be at our best as an outlet for stories that have not been covered extensively, or have not been covered well (neutrally, or perhaps accurately), by the English msm. Not that we don't do big stories; I'm just saying we're not at all bound to them. We collect snapshots in time, and we have a huge, and ever-growing, archive of them.

A few miscellaneous thoughts. We're generally interested in relevant rather than sensational news, although authentically amusing items are in-bounds (we have a Category:Wackynews). A story with a specific focal event is wanted, and you want to keep an eye on just when that specific thing happened because freshness is measured relative to that specific thing (not the publication date of any given source) versus when we publish our article (not when it's written). Btw, we do have an explicit policy prohibition against using pay-to-read sources. --Pi zero (talk) 21:35, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

• Hello Peter Chastain. Do you program in nodejs? Please see here. (Your Wikipedia page mentions programming, hence the question.) Gryllida (talk) 00:11, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

@Gryllida: Unfortunately, I haven't yet learned Nodejs. It is one of many technologies on my wish list. Thanks. Peter Chastain (talk) 17:58, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Ah ok. Thanks in any case for letting me know. What languages are you familiar with? Do you have published codes somewhere, if you do not mind me asking? --Gryllida (talk) 01:52, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Welcome

I am glad you have joined the cause! The more people, the better the news. Just about over a year ago I joined the cause and wrote up an article about a sexual abuse scandal I had insight on where the elitist assholes on Wikipedia still have not got right. My words of wisdom are keep an open mind and if you at first don't succeed keep trying. Also remember we are all here for the cause, outside of some rogue accounts that are flagged.

In the collaboration pages I advised you to change the account name. I stick by that. At first it may seem innocuous, but like everything on the internet it never goes away. Just try it on for size, like "NewGuyPC".

If you were go a little older school you could do the, "Hi_I_am_a_PC" from those Mac commercials. AZOperator (talk) 20:17, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for cleaning up my article! I see, by the way, you have been here for a good 8 years... what brings you back? 96.83.66.44 (talk) 13:12, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome. My foray, 8 years ago, doesn't really count because all I did was a tiny user page and one talk-page comment. Right now, I am trying to put together a "Wikimedia Loves Libraries" event in small-town Oregon. A large part of the event would be an introduction to Wikimedia projects for end-users (non-editors), and I want Wikinews to be part of that. So, here I am, becoming familiar with it. I will hang around, of course, but Wikipedia remains my main focus. Peter Chastain (talk) 17:38, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi again Peter Chastain :-)

I invite you to leave a tip each time you read something interesting.

• Leaving such a tip may take as little time as one minute.
• After leaving them a few times you could teach others to do this -- for example, at the 'Wikipedia/Wikimedia Loves Libraries event'.
• People who leave such tips regularly may find it easier to write more and more about a story each time.
• And they may learn to write full articles, or volunteer at the newsroom.
• This may shape in everyone, you also, the writing and fact checking skills.
  That's useful baggage to have these days, when mainstream media actively tricks people into believing in wrong things.
• (We are looking for more people to copyedit and review, and this volunteering would be invaluably helpful to Wikinews, as well.)

Best regards,
--Gryllida (chat) 04:51, 19 September 2018 (UTC)