Wikinews:Water cooler/assistance/archives/2020/May

Interviews

Hello,

I'm on the French Wikinews and I often visit your homepage and I often see interviews. How have all your interviews ? Have you a special method to obtain too more interviews than other Wikinews ?

Thanks, AirSThib (talk) 13:08, 4 May 2020 (UTC).

@AirSThib: Hi. If you give me some time, I will brief you the steps that went in for the empathy article.
•–• 13:30, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Thanks. AirSThib (talk) 13:32, 4 May 2020 (UTC).

@AirSThib: So, it started with me finding the newsworthy story. I didn't find two mutually independent sources, but I found the contact details of the researchers. I emailed the researchers asking if they would like to discuss the findings of the study with Wikinews. They said yes, and we scheduled a video interview via Skype. I carefully chose the dates such a way that I got time to go through the research thoroughly and to frame the questions. They were copyedited by other editors off-wiki, just for the sake of grammatical accuracies and suggesting questions. When I am interviewing, I refer to the notes about the questions, but sometimes if a question is impulsive, I ask it. Sometimes the order of the question needs to be rearranged depending on their answers. After the interview, I share the files with a reviewer, and since I discovered toollabs:video2commons allows us to convert mp4 to a supported format on Commons, I started uploading the interviews too. Well, after I share the interview, I start transcribing. A reviewer reviews it as how a reviewer handles a video source. Listening and verifying. That is generally how it goes. English Wikinews has the accreditation policy and accredited users get a Wikinewsie email ID. However, for the interview with IM Dorsa Derakhshani, I contacted them via Instagram. Thing is, you need to reach out on your own. If you want, I can share the emails/messages how I contacted them, so you can use something like them.
•–• 13:44, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

@AirSThib: In addition to acagastya's excellent process description, above, I offer a general observation. I too have noticed, over the years, that we do quite a bit of this sort of thing on English Wikinews. I think it's part of en.wn culture: since very early in the life of the project, interviews have been understood to be "high-end" contribution, among the most respected —and most demanding— forms of reporting on the project. Quite a lot of our interviews are eventually promoted to Featured Article status (linkWikinews:Dialog/do). When we set up the wikinewsie-dot-org domain (as a result of the Wikimedia Foundation turning us down flat on all the technical support we requested of them at Wikimania 2008), much of the purpose of it was to aid in original reporting; most simply, if one contacts someone to request an interview, we figured they'd be more likely to take the request seriously coming from an email account "at wikinewsie dot org" than from one "at hotmail dot com" or the like. Though attitudes toward social media have changed somewhat over the years (for example, acagastya's successful use of Instagram, above). --Pi zero (talk) 14:54, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for all these answers, that is interesting. We'll try to take this habit too. For information, I've translated one of your excellent interviews here. Yours --AB Louis (talk) 19:10, 5 May 2020 (UTC)