Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2016/May

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20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

23:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Re science journalism

Thought I'd pass this one along. Posted today on Language Log: [16]. --Pi zero (talk) 16:14, 11 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Editing another's article

I've had a look, and can't seem to find any guidance on the following matter.

I've seen a few articles recently which have failed review because they are no longer fresh at the time of review, but subsequent developments mean the article could be tweaked, still using at least part of the originals contributors work. What is best in this scenario? To start a new article from scratch, perhaps making use of the originals's sources, or to develop the older one, most likely by changing the headline and lede, before leading into the existing content as background info? --CSJJ104 (talk) 14:18, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@CSJJ104: It may depend on how confident you are that the article has no other problems lurking in it. If there are other problems lurking, such as copied passages, then you may be better off starting over from scratch. In the past few days we've had a glut on the review queue, and when an article lost freshness I couldn't afford to then invest in ferreting out other lurking problems (since not having enough time for everything was part of the problem in the first place). --Pi zero (talk) 16:06, 15 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

16:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

A new "Welcome" dialog

Hello everyone. This is a heads-up about a change which has just been announced in Tech News: Add the "welcome" dialog (with button to switch) to the wikitext editor.

In a nutshell, later this week this will provide a one-time "Welcome" message in the wikitext editor which explains that anyone can edit, and every improvement helps. The user can then start editing in the wikitext editor right away, or switch to the visual editor. (This is the equivalent of an already existing welcome message for visual editor users, which suggests the option to switch to the wikitext editor. If you have already seen this dialog in the visual editor, you will not see the new one in the wikitext editor.)

  • I want to make sure that, although users will see this dialog only once, they can read it in their language as much as possible. Please read the instructions if you can help with that.
  • I also want to underline that the dialog does not change in any way current site-wide and personal configurations of the visual editor. Nothing changes permanently for users who chose to hide the visual editor in their Preferences or for those who don't use it anyway, or for wikis where it's still a Beta Feature, or for wikis where certain groups of users don't get the visual editor tab, etc.
    • There is a slight chance that you see a few more questions than usual about the visual editor. Please refer people to the documentation or to the feedback page, and feel free to ping me if you have questions too!
  • Finally, I want to acknowledge that, while not everyone will see that dialog, many of you will; if you're reading this you are likely not the intended recipients of that one-time dialog, so you may be confused or annoyed by it—and if this is the case, I'm truly sorry about that. This message also avoids that you have to explain the same thing over and over again—just point to this section. Please feel free to cross-post this message at other venues on this wiki if you think it will help avoid that users feel caught by surprise by this change.

If you want to learn more, please see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133800; if you have feedback or think you need to report a bug with the dialog, you can post in that task (or at mediawiki.org if you prefer).

Thanks for your attention and happy editing, Elitre (WMF) 16:51, 16 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

18:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

16:18, 30 May 2016 (UTC)