Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2017/April

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17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Category

One of the journalism students posted an article about Australian Aborigines and I've been digging around for any sort of "indigenous peoples" or "Indigenous rights" category. Do we actually not have one? Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:37, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Darkfrog24: If we had, it should be a subcat of Category:Human rights, which it isn't; also Special:Search turns up nothing relevant in category space for native or aboriginal (and, really, if it were there I'd likely have run across it at some point). --Pi zero (talk) 12:07, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Well it's good to know I don't just have category blindness. We might want to think of establishing one of those (the category, not the blindness). Although Australian and Taiwanese first nations are very different from American Indians in most ways, there are aspects of colonialism that affect them similarly. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Darkfrog24: How does such a category relate to, say, Ireland or Scotland or Wales, or Basque Country (or for that matter Cornwall, though one doesn't hear about that so much)? Or... Israel and Palestine? --Pi zero (talk) 12:47, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
For Ireland, I don't think they do. The general understanding of "indigenous peoples" is populations of people who were displaced or similarly affected by migrations/invasions of other populations during the early modern period (colonialism). Kind of like how "Republican" refers to the American political party and "republican" to anyone who promotes republics and how Catholicism is a specific religion but being catholic just means anything inclusive or open to everyone. So technically the descendants of people living in Ireland before the Celtic migrations could be called indigenous without violating the dictionary definition, but they don't fit into modern discourse in the same way.
It sounds like what you really want to know is "How do we at Wikinews determine who is and isn't an indigenous person?" My take is that we shouldn't. We should look for and then follow established journalistic practices.
According to the United Nations, "Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them." It seems to come from José R. Martínez Cobo's "Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations." I could check the AP and Economist style guides at some point to see if they have a take on this. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Darkfrog24: I'd imagined you had in mind a topic category, i.e., a category that published news articles would go into (rather than an internal category for people who are indigenous). A good topic category has some characteristics... I don't think I can name them all (it's more of an "i can't define it but I know if it I see it" kind of thing), but two of them are
  • It should be clear what articles should and shouldn't go in it. The name of the category is part of that, and there may be a usage note field on the {{topic cat}} template to clarify.
  • There should be some key words, that are quite likely to occur on articles that belong in the category and are likely to be wikilinked, so they can be made mainspace redirects to the category and thereby help to assure the category will continue to be populated with appropriate articles as they are published over time.
--15:36, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
No, I mean it would be a category for articles about indigenous peoples and the issues that affect them, not for individual people. The closest homolog I can see is CAT:LGBT. It might be more accurate to call it "Indigenous issues" but that's not what people say (which makes it hard for the article's first author to remember what to put after CAT:), and "Indigenous rights" would not be appropriate for articles about, say, a show full of indigenous art.
Hm, I guess key words would be things like "Native Americans," "American Indians," "Aborigines," maybe the names of specific indigenous peoples like "Cherokee" and "Sami." Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:48, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The last week of the 1st cycle of Wikimedia strategy conversation

Hi, I'm Szymon, a MetaWiki Strategy Coordinator. 3 weeks ago, we invited you to join a broad discussion about Wikimedia's future role in the world. The discussion is divided into 3 cycles, and the first one ends on April, 15. So far, Wikimedians have been discussing mainly about technological improvements, multilingual support, friendly environment, cooperation with other organizations and networks.

I'm pinging one of 2 recently active admins. I hope you'll help me with passing along the news, maybe even join the discussion. @Bddpaux:. (Pi zero, I didn't want you to get cross-wiki spammed :)

Looking forward to your input. Thank you in advance! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Truthfully I'm not favorably disposed to the process. The Foundation's institutional objectives (not a reflection on individuals within the Foundation) are fundamentally incompatible with those of the collective volunteer community; in the long run, I see only two alternatives: either the sisterhood will find a way to get out from under the thumb of the Foundation (though atm I can't imagine how), or the sisterhood will whither and die. --Pi zero (talk) 00:45, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Pi zero: I understand that. The future of some projects, e.g. Wikinews, seems to be uncertain. By the way, that's actually a strategy-related comment and is perfectly eligible for being copy-pasted to one of the pages I mentioned in the second bullet point :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@SGrabarczuk (WMF): The Foundation is inherently anti-wiki; it can't help being so; and that's just as much of a problem for Wikipedia as for any other sister. I do think Wikinews is something of a bellwether: if Wikinews goes down, the rest of the sisters will fall like dominoes, with Wikipedia at the end of the row. My point is that the Foundation is singularly unqualified to make long-term plans for the sisterhood. Any plans the Foundation touches will be twisted by the nature of the Foundation. --Pi zero (talk) 01:10, 8 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

18:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:33, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Two languages of Wikinews proposed for closure

Two following Wikinews are proposed for closure: Norwegian and Albanian. I invite you to those. --George Ho (talk) 21:17, 26 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The strategy discussion. The Cycle 2 will start on May 5

The first cycle of the Wikimedia movement strategy process recently concluded. During that period, we were discussing the main directions for the Wikimedia movement over the next 15 years. There are more than 1500 summary statements collected from the various communities, but unfortunately, none from your local discussion. The strategy facilitators and many volunteers have summarized the discussions of the previous month. A quantitative analysis of the statements will be posted on Meta for translation this week, alongside the report from the Berlin conference.

The second cycle will begin soon. It's set to begin on May 5 and run until May 31. During that period, you will be invited to dive into the main topics that emerged in the first cycle, discuss what they mean, which ones are the most important and why, and what their practical implications are. This work will be informed and complemented by research involving new voices that haven’t traditionally been included in strategy discussions, like readers, partners, and experts. Together, we will begin to make sense of all this information and organize it into a meaningful guiding document, which we will all collectively refine during the third and last cycle in June−July.

We want to help your community to be more engaged with the discussions in the next cycle. Now, we are looking for volunteers who could

  • tell us where to announce the start of the Cycle 2, and how to do that, so we could be sure the majority of your community is informed and has a chance to feel committed, and
  • facilitate the Cycle 2 discussions here, on Wikinews.

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Base (WMF) and SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:10, 27 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]