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This is an archive of past discussions from Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2012. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current page.


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I've tried to place an advert on Facebook to capitalise on the Paralympics coverage as a way of increasing our following, and possibly contributor base. Don't know if it 'took', because after skipping the "offer code" I just got an eternally-waiting-to-refresh page.

FYI, as an example of FB 'reach' the Micronesia story, posted around an hour ago, shows 576 people saw the post. --Brian McNeil / talk 15:04, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • The stats from Facebook are quite interesting, and came as quite a shock to at least one page admin. However, they don't seem to convert too-well into actual on-wiki page views.
The number of 'likes' for our Facebook page have jumped up to over 7,500; those are people who will see more Wikinews stories on their timeline.
However, the 'reach' (number of people who actually see one of our FB links to an article) is where the most-spectacular increases are. The week to August 29 saw reach at 5,808. A day later, 66,200, then 102,384, 127,587, 145,751, 145,677 and now, the week to September 4, 145,041.
This needs plotted against views we've recorded here, but my 'gut feeling' is there's a big disconnect. That is something we need to address, and look closely at with a view to converting that into regular readers who click-through to Wikinews articles.
The Paralympics have been an interesting, and valuable, opportunity for Wikinews; I'm going to create a new section for a "Post-Mortem" where we can look at what worked, and what didn't. I suspect each point we need to go over to be an open discussion, so will sub-section them. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:12, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Paralympics "Post-Mortem"

  1. Feedback from the reporters
  2. Feedback from the reviewers
  3. Feedback from readers
  4. Facebook and other social media
  5. Future event credentialling
  6. Technology review


Feedback from the reporters

  • 2 or more is better. Exhaustion sets in. Burn out sets in. If we did this again and had the money to send four people, I would. I'm not certain how I would separate things in terms of photographer and reporter, but everyone would need to be able to write and have a camera to take pictures. It gets really easy to burn out and we managed to keep publishing basically because I did a lot early on. Hawkeye7 picked up the slack when I basically completely lost it due to burnout and exhaustion. --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Knowledge is key. Anyone going to do this has to know what they are reporting. If you don't know about the sport, if you don't know about how it works, if you don't know the people, you cannot report well or walk into a sport you've never seen and report on it well. They need to know how to edit Wikipedia, because we've had to do this. We've also had to know Commons.--LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Experience is key. Anyone going into a major event like this needs to have done some serious original reporting for sports at previous events as a member of the press. Ditto for photographers. You need to know various etiquette, know what is acceptable, things like going to shot clock, learning to fear less being at something like this because it is intimidating to walk into the first time. Also, track record of success makes going into a 10+ day OR reporting fest of zero sleep less intimidating. Sydney wheelchair basketball was tremendously helpful. --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Non-location based support is necessary. Hawkeye7 and I are or were sitting on 7 interviews that needed to be transcribed. Trying to do this while continuing on with doing additional reporting adds huge amounts of stress. Having assistance for this would be fantastic as this sort of content really is what makes attending more worth while. (That an ability to take our own pictures.) There are also some places where we had the notes to make a really good story but on the ground time constraints and limited personnel constraints meant that while our notes and interviews would have made for some great stories, no one was available to write them.--LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reviewer burnout adds stress for reporters too. We don't want to burn them out but becomes an issue of do we write less to avoid burn out? Do we write longer? How do we cover things without adding stress? --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Technology worked out reasonably well. The biggest stress was the IPC charging 90/130 pounds for internet and plus+ access. The 3G sucked big time and bigger time. This was... frustrating in the extreme. I think Hawkeye7 and I wanted to hit each other repeatedly because of our frustrations with this.--LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Stats matter. We've got to better justify to organisations as to why we should be working with them for things like this. (Unless we independently fund, and as this probably cost $9,000 AUD for each of us to be here, not having stats to give to funding groups was frustrating and more frustrating.) --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Lack of adequate Wikipedia support Wikipedia support was causing problems. A major event like this needs both at the same time. At one point, I was getting asked to update Wikipedia while here because the people we were counting on to do it for the Paralympics were not. --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reviewer/Editor coordination was problematic with things like copyright at time. I assumed I wouldn't have to worry about copyright through dropbox and then it became an issue at time. I wasn't always notified when articles I worked on did not pass. Or I was notified when Hawkeye7 needed to fix. (I'd wanted Hawkeye7 to learn better to make it easier for him as he went along so he could become a better writer for Wikinews.) --LauraHale (talk) 20:45, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback from the reviewers

Feedback from readers

Feel free to pull remarks from comments pages, followups on Facebook, remarks passed to you, etc. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:22, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook and other social media

If not, can we make changes so that we can capture such data? --Brian McNeil / talk 14:29, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Future event credentialling

  • The unprecedented level of access is what has permitted Wikinews to have so much coverage. I very much doubt this would've come about if Laura Hale hadn't got interested enough to contribute to the project when we met at GLAMsterdam late last year. She pushed for Wikimedia Australia to make contributing to Wikinews part of their criteria when working on the credentialling of people in collaboration with the Australian Paralympic Committee.
I believe we should be actively soliciting:
  1. Feedback from Wikimedia Australia.
  2. Feedback from the Australian Paralympic Committee.
  3. Some sort of comparison with other small media organisations who may-well only have has one or two reporters present.
  4. Feeback/acknowledgement from the WMF that there are licensing issues which a "Wikipedia fits all" approach doesn't suit.

--Brian McNeil / talk 14:41, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

At this point, I'm unsure how much I will push this as "Wikimedia goes to Sochi" or "Wikimedia goes to Rio." I sent the WMF pictures and I don't think they covered the Paralympics at all in their blog. : / Signpost wasn't positive; they covered this as copyright makes this difficult instead of freaking awesome first. No Wikipedians showed up to support the Wikinews side of it. Most of my best support has come from the APC. Outside of one or two WM-UK folks doing reviews (which I am EXTREMELY grateful for), there wasn't much going on community wise despite repeated attempts to engage. Is it worth doing this inside the structure of a chapter or the foundation going forward? The one going to do the work is probably me. Or some one related to Jimmy, where there is better control of the narrative from the WMF end. I'm watching the men's wheelchair basketball gold medal match between Canada and Australia and I'm not sure I want to do a huge amount of personal work for some one else to get the "reward" at the end of the day. --LauraHale (talk) 21:28, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Technology review

What development direction do we next take this tool? Useful Dropbox capacity costs, and there are free "cloud" alternatives that would go straight to our own hosting. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:53, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
We've been having a lot of incidents of articles submitted for review with the images still lacking copyright data. Wondering what measure might reduce frequency thereof. --Pi zero (talk) 19:35, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Per a quick discussion in IRC, I'd propose the following:
We ignore the "upload_JWS" side for this; that's a closed wiki, so licenses aren't that critical. But, on the "upload_enWN" side, how's about changes like this:
  1. Users must create sub folder(s) for their media.
  2. In each sub folder, they create a "description.txt" textfile, this is used as the description for every media file uploaded (or converted and uploaded).
In this way, we could've had Laura create a sub-folder "LH-basketball", put in a single descriptive text file saying it's all CC-BY-NC, that they're her photos, and no need to touch them post-upload.
As with most developed-on-the-fly tools, it's once you've seen it in-action that you spot the shortcomings. --Brian McNeil / talk 19:56, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Re EzPR, we've noted in the past that we'd really like a customizable writer-feedback function, where anyone who contributed significantly to the article may —at the reviewer's discretion— receive a notice of the review, with a customizable comment and links to the review comments (specific section of article talk) and the article history. I'm just mentioning it again, because I've wished for such a function a number of times during the Paralympics. It'd help writers of all ilks be more aware of details of the fate of their articles, from those who aren't even fully aware that their work might not be published the first time 'round, to those trying diligently to improve, to those simply apt to lose track due to sheer volume at times of peak production. --Pi zero (talk) 16:04, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
EzPR needs to cease being a Javascript mega-hack, and start being an actual extension. --Brian McNeil / talk 19:58, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
For the medium term, weighing an extension versus a cleaner js rewrite, the extension would likely be less flexible. --Pi zero (talk) 20:37, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mention has been made of the difficulty in transcribing interviews. I've found a nice little tool in Linux called "rubberband" which 'stretches' audio whilst maintaining the pitch/tone. Thus, you get a slowed-down audio for use when transcribing. Looking to find the 'sweet spot' in-terms of how much to stretch files, then implement it as part of NewsieBot's responsibilities. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:16, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Eff You Very Much, Commons!

I can't believe this.

What a bunch of anal self-probing assholes!

Commons does absolutely nothing to serve the Wikimedia Community; Their reason for existing seems to be to delete stuff on whatever spurious grounds they can. I, for one, will not be donating images which I use in news reporting to them ever again. This 'jingle' was obviously intended to be "donated" to the WMF and trade-marked, as are the various project logos.

But, such offends the sensibilities of a bunch of, ... Freetards.

I'm not going to waste my time fighting for this to be restored, or uploaded locally, I'm just going to wait for them to get round to deleting all the audio Wikinews stuff that includes this Jingle, then I'll have proof they've zero interest in the goals of the other projects.

I am oh-so-tempted to bring up a discussion on [[WN:AAA] about blocking commoners who remove the stuff they delete with little-or-no reason from our content. --Brian McNeil / talk 07:32, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I get this-page-does-not-currently-exist on that link. --Pi zero (talk) 12:01, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed the link. It's technically at commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_in_Category:Wikinews_jingles. -- Cirt (talk) 16:22, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • This recalls the incident, late last month, where the image on our number one lead was deleted from commons — the single most prominent image on the main page, other perhaps than the banner across the top. The deletion log indicated it had been tagged since before we used it, though it does seem remarkable timing that the image had been hosted there since 2005, and was deleted a little more than 24 hours after it appeared at the top of our main page (just long enough, that is, for our archive policy to kick in on the article). I considered inquiring of the deleting admin, but found at the time I wouldn't have been able to inquire politely.
Perhaps we need a bot to trawl Commons and detect when images used on Wikinews are up for deletion — not so we can contest the deletions, because who has time to squabble with a rigged bureaucracy, but so we can do preemptive uploads to Wikinews (when possible, which is probably in nearly every case) ahead of deletion. --Pi zero (talk) 18:34, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, seems the easiest temporary solution would be to host the images in question locally. -- Cirt (talk) 19:01, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I look at that discussion and I see oh-so much moronic idiocy. People who'll delete stuff crucial to Wikinews and, in the same breath, bitch about Wikipedia's puzzle-globe being copywritten (and a registered mark). They don't understand copyright at-all. Would they like to see the puzzle globe on every and any website, abused in print, etc, etc?
So, we now need a bot to copy all media used in published articles from Commons to Wikinews because they never check where something is used? Idiots. I wish some of them would go perform Riverdance in a minefield. --Brian McNeil / talk 21:10, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Calm down, Brian, and stop insulting people. You're doing it on a publicly available page on the Internet, you know. odder (talk) 16:36, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
When faced with idiocy, Wikipedian culture favors (at least, in theory favors) pretending it isn't idiotic, and patiently discussing things ad nauseam, while Wikinewsie culture favors cutting to the chase and calling it idiocy. --Pi zero (talk) 19:00, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, then as a, quote, freetard, I am not going to spend any more time editing a project with such a "culture". Tomasz W. Kozłowski (talk) 17:08, 16 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

┌───────────────────────┘
 Odder, my intent was not to insult people who contribute here; instead, that term was used in extreme frustration at the way Commons completely ignores the consequences of their deletions. Can you imagine the outcry if they deleted an image in-use on the main page of English Wikipedia? Do you expect equally-strong language would be used? I do. Well, Commons have deleted images in-use on Wikinews' main page. They rely upon a bot coded with the assumption that every project works the self-same way as Wikipedia to clean up after their deletions.

I've calmed down now, Odder. And, I do mean it with the apology for people like yourself who contribute to Wikinews, and do know that the culture here is different. But, as should be unsurprising, my jaw practically hit the floor when I saw people over on Commons - shall we say - "muttering" about how they would like to delete the Wikipedia puzzle globe because it is "Copyright WMF".

Where we can work with Commons, we do so. But, very few Wikinewsies have the time to do things like follow the deletion processes over there. CommonsDelinker is now banned from Wikinews, and I'm in the process of writing our own bot to save images which, in all probability, we can assert fair use on.

If Commons wanted to help other projects, part of their deletion process would involve looking at where images are used, and moving the images to those wikis. That can be followed with a request for the local wiki to assess if they can claim fair use on an image. To contrast how that can differ from project to project: Wikipedia can claim fair use on an image from a news article, we cannot. We can claim fair use on some images of people which are 'irreplaceable at a point in time', Wikipedia cannot as an image could be obtained at a future point which is more-freely licensed. --Brian McNeil / talk 21:11, 16 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment period on the Wikimedia United States Federation

There is a proposal for an an umbrella organization for chapters and other groups in the US called the Wikimedia United States Federation. A draft of the bylaws is now up at meta. There will be an open comment period on the bylaws 17 September, 2012 to 1 October, 2012. The comments received given will be incorporated into the bylaws and they will be put up to a ratification vote from 8 October, 2012 to 15 October, 2012. --Guerillero (talk) 21:55, 17 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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