Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/Archive/1

When Wikinews is not news

I fear editors here are taking a Wikipedicentric view of articles and not recognizing that consumers of news rarely go back to an article written days (or even hours) ago. And almost NEVER go back and re-read an article already viewed. That is why it is odd to me that people continue to update already-published days-old articles (reports) instead of writing a new article with a fresh angle. This isn't WP - it's WN - and we need to realize that the audience will not change the way it reads news to accommodate our little project or desire to make an older article better or "more complete." So, we'd better change the way we think of articles to accommodate our readers. If an article is a day old and you have new information, write a NEW article with that new information as the lead. Davodd 02:10, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I notice that a lot of mainstream news sites recycle material from earlier stories in follow up stories. When a follow up story doesn't stand on its own, it seems like a good idea to recycle a portion of the original story, in addition to providing a link to the previous story in a "Related Stories" section. I'm curious if anyone else thinks this recycling practice is acceptable, or how one should decide what to recycle. — DV 07:25, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

1. (linking to previous articles) Value of a story increases when it becomes a part of a continuous coverage or special report. See, for example Lycos Europe ends its anti-spam campaign, Ukraine political crisis. Many people read/watch/listen to news sporadically, rather than daily, and that means having an archive of related stories would help them.

2. (editing old articles) I do understand your concern that editing days-old articles is less valuable. But if we were to give up old articles, would we simply keep them as incomplete/biased/inaccurate? Would we delete them? Either option does not sound very attractive, and I sometimes feel like polishing them is the best choice. But I could be wrong on this. I am interested to know what others think. Tomos 08:57, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is common practice (and helpful to the reader) when writing a follow-up story, to recap background details later on in the story. My suggestion: To write a followup, then have a links section to related articles (or previous news on the same topic). Davodd 09:42, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think we need to edit stories that are incorrect, biased, etc. Articles that don't fit our content or style criteria should be changed. However, if there is new news since the time the original article was written, that should be a separate article. If there's enough of these articles, we should probably have what I'm terming an "In Depth" topic page — like our current page on the tsunami disaster. -- IlyaHaykinson 09:38, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Do you think the in-depth type of story would be more appropriate at Wikipedia? If not, what would distinguish a WN in-depth feature from being a duplicate or in competition with a WP article? Isn't it a waste of resources, when we could just as easily point to WP for in-depth rather that try to duplicate that type of breadth here? Davodd 09:47, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think the in-depth pages need to summarize the current event (after all, in theory Wikipedia should not be doing that — that's Wikinews's job; an encyclopedia's primary job is not news), but more specifically the in-depth page should be linking to the individual articles in a timeline fashion, showing how the news developed. It's not the best example because it's incomplete, but Ukraine political crisis kind of shows what I am referring to. I firmly believe that when people show up at Wikinews they will want context for their stories and we need to provide them such context without relying on Wikipedia to be as up to date on issues as we will be (especially when this deals with more local issues). -- IlyaHaykinson 10:47, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the case. I can see two main ways in which people will access Wikinews. One is by bookmarking the main page, and logging in daily to read the latest news. The second is to follow a particular story. For example I'm regularly reloading the Indian Ocean Earthquake page at the moment. It would be even better if each page had an associated RSS feed that I could subscribe to so I would know when pages I was interested in had been updated. Both options have merits. There is no point having access to an old version of the Indian Ocean Earthquake page in my view - this is the 'overview' or summary page of the incident as it unfolds. This is not print - we don't have to reprint the page every time there's an update. This is not broadcast news - it is possible to re-edit old news. This is what Wikinews should take advantage of. However there will be plenty of spin-off stories that will deserve their own pages (lack of news in Myanmar, relief response, local stories etc etc... and they should all be linked to from the overview page as well as standing up in their own right. Karim 09:24, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sure, mistakes should be corrected. My fear is that the vision you present of Wikinews could put it in direct competition with Wikipedia as being a repository of information on non-breaking news items. I believe the strength of this project is that it can be a breaking news source that taps into the huge population of Internet users who can give timely, up-to-the-minute reports from every corner of the globe. The main weakness of Wikinews that I sense from some editors here is a dot-com-era type of arrogance that "the old ways" of journalism are outdated and do not apply here. They do. Wikipedia is Internet news - and it is competing with thousands of voices (as can be seen on [1]) and our older articles will be lost in the rush. It's a fact of life we must recognize. That said, I believe that our old articles will be very valuable as "clippings" or resources for Wikipedia. Davodd

The wikipedia article on THE earthquake is better than the wikinews one. Further, the wikinews one appears to be essentially an OLDER version of the Wikipedia article - rather than the other way around. Something is very off here. At first I thought maybe wikinews should be a subset of wikipedia, just have "current news" labeled wikipedia articles formated automaticlly onto a wikinews place/site/skin/whatever. Then I saw Davodd's comments and I thought maybe a 24 hour timeout thing might work. Perhaps like this: Any article created on wikinews disappears from wikinews after 24 hours, but goes to wikipedia for archive/deletion/whatever. Maybe identifying where it goes after 24 hours could be part of the article, like the title and its subject categoriy. ( And on a different area of concern about wikinews altogether - PLEASE DON'T CONFUSE PRODUCT PLACEMENT WITH NEWS (e.g. "Microsoft announces <advertisement deleted>".) -- anonymous

Unfortunately, the "newer" article on Wikipedia has also been prone to wild speculation and unsupported numbers. This type of sensationalism will be deadly for Wikinews.

I challenged the one user here who merely copied numbers from Wikipedia to provide a citation, as Wikipedia cannot be relied upon as a primary source. Unfortunately, he came and left.

We have to cite numbers that either come directly from officials of the affected countries, or from news organizations with reporters that are directly confirming their numbers with those officials.

Otherwise we have zero credibility.

I rather wait and have a slightly "older" article than Wikipedia, if that's what it takes to get the numbers right.

However, if we had more firsthand reporting (there was a Wikipedian from Chennai who posted some of the pictures) we would have a much more compelling story to tell without having to resort to speculating on "feared dead" numbers, (or posting dubious relief agency addresses and phone numbers), just to keep our article "newer" than everyone else.

I hope we're not so compelled to get the "scoop" over Wikipedia that we lower our what little standards we have so far.

— DV 12:18, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What benefit does Wikinews provide, redundancy aside?

Ok, so we have the wikipedia article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, and the Wikinews article on Strongest earthquake in 40 years hits Southeast Asia. We have the wikipedia {{current}} template for current events, and we have a likewise disclaimer on wikinews for current events. Both are articles, both are NPOV. The Wikipedia article is vastly better and provides more information. The Wikinews article links to a bunch of wikipedia articles and copies the content, simply writing it in a different style. Further, Wikipedia has on its main page an "In the news" section, and those articles are updated to reflect the changes. In addition, Wikipedia has a current events page.

So essentially, we have two wikis reporting the same information in likewise articles that are simply written differently. I don't see the point. I'd rather see all of our resources pooled to the other projects rather than continuous and unnecessary decentralization. This project defeats one of Wikipedia's biggest advantages: it is accurate up to the second. (maybe that sounds like a pipedream ideology but just you wait a few years) --Alterego 07:58, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

My take is that Wikipedia is good for writing a large issue, long-term events, etc. Things like local news and small news stories are not good for Wikipedia. See list of articles on Science and technology, or Category:Politics and conflicts, for example. Many of them do not find any place in Wikipedia because they are not encyclopediac enough. Tomos 08:24, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I tend to agree. Wikipedia's strength are for historically significant news items and for reasonably 'static' data. Wikinews feels like it's strength would be in topical and volatile items - stuff that needs a lot of detail today but loses all relevance after a week or so. If an article grows and starts treating the topic comprehensively, then that's probably a good candidate for migrating it over into Wikipedia. BryceHarrington 09:29, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The main answer to the question presented is: Wikinews is news; Wikipedia is history. Sure there will be some overlap of subject matter, but the emphasis and calling for each project is different. Davodd | Talk 23:29, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikinews should post detailed information about every single event related to the earthquake, while Wikipedia should contain summaries of these events (which could link to the Wikinews articles). I think we should not have "report" type pages on Wikinews that are very similar to Wikipedia articles.--Eloquence