User talk:Mikemoral

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2009 archive

2010 archive

2011 archive

Archive 1

Please review

Hi Mikemoral

Please review:

Current review queue as of 22:51, 18 April 2019 (UTC):

• 18 April 2019: Donation drive raises over US$1 million to rebuild Louisiana churches after Notre Dame de Paris also catches fire
• 17 April 2019: Sudanese protesters protect defense ministry sit-in
• 17 April 2019: Officials find fire alarm sounded 23 minutes before the fire was reported in Notre Dame, Paris
• 7 April 2019: Students compete in world's second Neurosurgery Olympiad in Tyumen, Russia

For inspiration here is heaps of apples and a coconut drink:

Happy holidays,

--Gryllida (talk) 22:51, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

@Gryllida: Hi, it's been a long while since I've been around on-wiki. I've admittedly not popped in to check on Wikinews very often as of late, and any Wikimedia activity has been limited to occasional minor edits on Wikipedia. I'd be glad to come back to contributing here and Wikipedia, though it'll take be a while to get back into the swing of things.

Almost certainly I'm going to have to relearn how to review articles here. I'm sure it's been years and years since I've last reviewed one. For various reasons, including even more computer problems, I've not really been around, but ideally with a finally working machine contributing should be loads easier from now on. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 08:52, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm glad you have the computer working. :-) I think that you are right and it may take a while to get back to reading the drafts and reviewing. As far as I recall, the reviewing procedures are unchanged; the only change that I can recall since 2011 is a new instance of dupdet running at wikinewsie.org. Also there is a tool to notify you of new submissions by email, and this page has its description and how to sign up. Gryllida (talk) 00:20, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Goodness, are we measuring from 2011? We have some significant documentation since then. The Wikinews:Newsworthiness page was drastically overhauled in about 2014; it might as well be a whole new page. Wikinews:Pillars of writing was written mostly in 2012. Wikinews:Neutrality finally got written down in January of this year. I wonder what else I may be forgetting. --Pi zero (talk) 00:28, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

It looks like I'll need to get to some reading; the email notification system seems pretty interesting, I'll take a closer look soon. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 01:03, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

(Thought of one more, so far, though I feel it still needs improvement: Wikinews:Attribution, which was written in 2015–2016. Created so we'd have something to point at when telling people to attribute things, which we do often.) --Pi zero (talk) 01:16, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Re: welcome-a-bit

Hi Mikemoral,

Thanks for signing up! I've set up the list page, where your topics of interest are listed. Because you haven't selected any, it is the 'Developing' category name, where any new drafts are. The script will see it and send you an email page message shortly.

Your first message will be a list of what's currently under development in the topics of your interest. This might be a long list; this is normal. The future messages will only contain newly created submissions.

When a new draft is created I personally prefer to leave a new message at the talk page of the author, where they discover it more quickly -- perhaps more quickly than at the talk page of the article.

Please let me know if there are any issues with this message delivery. It is designed to encourage the recipient's involvement in helping newcomers, but simply testing the message delivery and reporting bugs would be greatly appreciated!!!

--Gryllida (talk) 10:23, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I was a bit unclear what topics to select, though all drafts seems a good option for now. I got the first email a-okay, and I'll be sure to report back any problems or suggestions. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 15:38, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

@Gryllida: If I wanted to switch to talkpage delivery, would I just make User:Mikemoral/wab/dev/wiki then delete User:Mikemoral/wab/dev/email? I don't want to break things here. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 20:44, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

This is correct. You can do it by a page move. Ensure you also include the talk page, where the tool keeps a timestamp of the last notification. Gryllida (talk) 21:44, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 22:17, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Benin, Nigeria join African Union continental free trade bloc

Published. --Pi zero (talk) 19:57, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the review! Sadly I'm much rustier than I thought. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 20:48, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Nevada authorities suspect Ridgecrest, California earthquakes killed man

Some ticklish difficulties; review comments. --Pi zero (talk) 21:58, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews.jpg.jpg

I dimly remember File:Wikinews.jpg.jpg as the visual component of some sort of spam, at least months ago. Should be straightforward to check... --Pi zero (talk) 12:01, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Hm, no, not straightforward. There's no record of it ever being deleted from here. --Pi zero (talk) 12:08, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Well, I can't find any record of it ever being on en.wn. From the dates of edits by the author, looks like it was only about two weeks ago (so presumably it only seems like months). --Pi zero (talk) 12:20, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: own work with no metadata. This is really of no use and should be moved to commons where it would be deleted. Or delete it from here. Also pinging @Green Giant:.
•–• 13:42, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: are you thinking of this edit, perhaps? I’m going to look into deleting the image. --Green Giant (talk) 16:09, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

I'd noticed the user created a userpage [1] which led me down a rabbit hole of their Commons contributions where they uploaded stuff from varuous websites to Commons using cross-wiki upload. Honestly I can't even remember what Wikinews.jpg.jpg was beyond I think a selfie? Though stuff uploaded to commons came from en.wikinews apparently. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 16:31, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Userspacing failed articles

We've been deliberately cutting back on this practice in the past year or so, especially for synthesis. We'd had some difficulty with some users using the project in a rather bloggish way, as if they didn't care whether articles got published as long as they could permanently web-host their articles here. The learning-from-experience aspect of userspacing tends to be rather weak anyway, I've observed, because the articles userspaced are likely to contain unvetted problems. --Pi zero (talk) 12:06, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Noted. The experience aspect is weak, but in this case it's a relatively new contributor and they don't seem to be blogging away. The useful thing though is the review comments as feedback. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 23:38, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Also noted. We've struggled for as long as I've been here with the memory-hole created by deleting unsuccessful articles, even though deleting them (most of the time) is also essential to our workflow. --Pi zero (talk) 23:53, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

I recently moved one because at the time I was too tired to evaluate it. Well, it wasn't a "failed" article, but something else. I am leaning towards deleting it. --SVTCobra 00:01, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Which article was this? I took a look but apparently I can't handle using a trackpad instead of a proper mouse :P —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 00:14, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

It is currently this User:J-Man11/3rd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles Formed. Cheers, --SVTCobra 00:18, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I remember seeing that one. It looks like encylopedic content to me which is a reason for speedy, or at least userfying over to Wikipedia as a draft rather than keeping it here. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 00:21, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Political parties?

What's your thinking on putting politicians in party categories? We've done that quite a lot, iirc; it's seemed to me a natural and useful practice, though certainly not consistent with SVTCobra's recent suggestion to keep person categories out of topic cats Your thoughts? --Pi zero (talk) 06:26, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I sort of thought the pratice was to not categorize politicians into party cats. I was thinking about categorizing as "Members of the GOP", like with the Senate cat, then having the party member cats be subcats of the party cats. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 06:56, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Some points of interest (after a bit of sleep).

• Historically, persons were not categorized by political party for the simple reason that there were no political-party categories. The deficit of categories and categorization is far too vast to fill at once, so we've proceeded mostly by slow growth; allowing actions that do just a tiny increment and leave things incomplete —even, more visibly incomplete than before the increment— has been essential in making it possible for things to move forward. Accordingly, adding political parties to persons has been a slow and perpetually incomplete process. I've been migrating things in that direction, though.
• Afaik, the purpose of keeping persons out of topic categories is to avoid cluttering the topic categories, so that other subcats of the topic don't get hard to find in the clutter. It's not immediately clear to me what other kinds of subcats a political party would have, for them to get lost. Moreover, whenever we have a political-party cat it seems likely we would have persons in that party. So if the only way to link a person to a party is to create a shadow-category for members-of-the-party, we would expect to create a shadow-cat for every party, and then put nothing in the party-cat except that shadow-cat. As I describe this now, it sounds to me like a great deal of complicating excess machinery without an apparent practical benefit.

(I'd be interested in SVTCobra's thoughts on this.) --Pi zero (talk) 14:09, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

I can say it is inconsistently applied right now, but if done uniformly, I can accept it. It is akin to sportspeople being in the category for their team or business people in the category for their company. I don't even think we necessarily need to make 'members of X party'. Cheers, --SVTCobra 23:05, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

The main reason I had removed the party categories from the two politicians (Rubio and Grassley?) was to keep them in line with how it's apparently being done now. I wasn't quite aware there was a move toward including politicians in their respective party cats. Adding politcians to their party-cats makes sense to me to do so. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 01:32, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Caribbean

Strictly speaking —this makes no difference whatever to your entirely proper edit to Category:Dominican Republic— the Caribbean is part of our North American region. --Pi zero (talk) 01:53, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

I view category:Caribbean as a cross-over category, much like Category:Middle East. Rather than a a strict geo-cat, they describe an area which straddle borders of traditional geo-cats based on tectonic plates, etc, because they have something else in common. On a different scale, Category:Kashmir is a distinct region, but it is in three countries. Category:Russia is a nation in two continents. Cheers, --SVTCobra 02:10, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Oh, and I will add, I do not think Category:Caribbean is strictly part of Category:North America. Nations such as Aruba are technically Category:South America (though I didn't check if that's where we have it). --SVTCobra 02:26, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Aruba is sorted in Caribbean and Netherlands. My change to the Dominican Republic cat was more to keep things consistent rather than make a statement about where the Caribbean is. Though, it might be best in the N. and S. America cats. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 13:52, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

The country cats are largely geocats but also have political/jurisdictional significance. And, I've gradually come to appreciate, the region categories are not continents even though we often casually call them such. They're news beats, the determination of which news desk is responsible for those areas. --Pi zero (talk) 14:22, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

FBI raids Los Angeles city attorney's, utility provider's offices

Have run into a snag re freshness — there was a further development on Tuesday. --Pi zero (talk) 19:46, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Drat, I failed to follow-up on the story; if the publication deadline can't be met, the content can possibly be saved for a future follow-up story, I sense there's going to be charges, or at least further federal (or even state/county) investigation into LA City. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 01:42, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

As a note to myself, it seems PwC attorneys are set to depose the city attorney in the coming weeks, so there will likely be a court record to find of the deposition. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 01:54, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Btw, thanks

for creating the NPR category (not to lose track of that, amidst discussions of inclusion criteria). That's one we've needed for a while. --Pi zero (talk) 02:06, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 12:32, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• Muslims Hajj (Category(ies): Developing; added by 156.203.252.193 at 2019-08-10 12:22:43, epoch 1565439763) --Trigonidiida (talk) 12:32, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 12:32, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• Moved to Muslims embark on annual pilgrimage to Mecca, formatted, added sources; now tagged {{abandoned}}. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 08:36, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 14:57, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• National Science Foundation Grants $1 million to Murray State (Category(ies): Developing; added by Mfgstrong at 2019-08-10 14:45:31, epoch 1565448331) --Trigonidiida (talk) 14:57, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 14:57, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• Submitted, reviewed, but not futher writing beyond a stub. —mikemoral (talk · contribs) 08:38, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 18:18, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

• Scientists report possible cure for Ebola (Category(ies): Developing; added by Darkfrog24 at 2019-08-12 17:39:38, epoch 1565631578) --Trigonidiida (talk) 18:18, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 18:18, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 11:41, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

• Shootout by freeway (Category(ies): Developing; added by Baozon90 at 2019-08-13 11:22:51, epoch 1565695371) --Trigonidiida (talk) 11:41, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 11:41, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 15:12, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

• Fighting between government and separatists reaches third day in Aden, Yemen (Category(ies): Developing; added by Darkfrog24 at 2019-08-15 14:45:56, epoch 1565880356) --Trigonidiida (talk) 15:12, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 15:12, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews recent additions 21:55, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

• Scientists study response to desert water scarcity in GPS-packing bats (Category(ies): Developing; added by Darkfrog24 at 2019-08-17 21:13:57, epoch 1566076437) --Trigonidiida (talk) 21:55, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

--Trigonidiida (talk) 21:55, 17 August 2019 (UTC)