Jump to content

Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2019/August

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!


State of the project...

I made a good faith effort to contribute here, about a decade ago.

In Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/Archive/18#Compliance with Wikinews:Etiquette and the following section, I left my warning that I thought wikinews was a troubled project.

So, what is the state of the project? Was an attempt ever made to be more welcoming? Have contributions dried up?

What happened with Bureaucrat Brian McNeil? He seems to have retired. He warned me I would be banned if I kept asking questions. I thought my questions had been civil, pertinent, and appropriate. So, it was his bullying that drove me from this project.

My sympathy to him and his family, if he stopped contributing here due to ill-health. But, can I ask if the incivility I experienced was later more widely recognized? Did he end up losing some of his status bits? Geo Swan (talk) 20:14, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We welcome folks who come here with positive attitudes, which in my experience is most of them; those who come here with disruptive intent, we invite to leave expeditiously, and often they claim en.wn is a hostile place though, of course, they brought with them the hostility they found here. Brianmc often dealt with the disruptive elements in order to let the rest of us get on with news production. --Pi zero (talk) 21:15, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Pi zero, did you mean to imply you think I was an individual who came to wikinews with disruptive intent? Did you mean to imply you think that I found hostility here because I brought hostility with me? I re-read the five attempts I made that were, eventually published. a, b, c, d, e. I dispute I brought hostility here. I am confident that a review of the talk pages of the drafts that were deleted because they weren't published would also show I exercised patience and respect in my questions.

    My recollection is that those drafts were marked "stale" when my good faith efforts to get explanations of the tags established contributors places did not receive meaningful or helpful replies.

    Now, if in the last decade you guys have figured out how to be more helpful, that would be great. If you haven't, don't shoot the messenger. Geo Swan (talk) 18:42, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I implied nothing about you specifically. I shared a general observation. You could have reacted contemplatively. What you did instead suggests that today (regardless of wiki-archaeology) you're carrying some negative baggage with you. --Pi zero (talk) 20:04, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, attempt to be more welcoming has been made. Some effort to this end are transparent and are detailed on the water cooler, and on my user page.
This does not exclude usage of phrases like "you royally screwed the start" (ref). They are a criticism of an action and not a person. I do not find them incivil and I am not sure why someone else would. Gryllida (talk) 21:28, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see a problem with Brian's comments. He may have been too harsh at times, but I am sure he had the best of intentions. I can understand some people get a little "picky" when they get told things they don't like, I don't blame them. But in my years here I never felt unwelcome; rather, for me it was a permanent learning. I improved my English while writing news articles, something I adore, and in the meantime contributed to a free project. I think we all won something. If people don't give Wikinews a chance, hardly they could get to understand its goal. It's true, Wikinews is running at a very slow pace, and for some time now, but that is not particularly because of some long-inactive users. --Diego Grez Cañete (talk) 03:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Gryllida, Diego Grez Cañete, one problem with individuals like Brian McNeil using inflammatory language, in response to good faith requests for explanation is that it acts to poison discussions. It escalates the tension. It erodes the collegiality that WMF policy requires of participants in all wikis and related projects. As a very experienced contributor, entrusted with administrator authority, I think the rest of the broader WMF community has a reasonable expectation he should have tried his best to set a good example of collegiality for less experienced contributors.

    On User talk:Brian McNeil Mr McNeil offered a terrible explanation for his incivility that I have read many times, from various WMF project insiders. Paraphrasing "I am too busy, and too important to spend time being civil."

    Over on enwiki I wrote an essay entitled "Every question, every disagreement, is a teachable moment". We have no training courses, inadequate or nonexistent tutorials, so, IMO, it is essential for everyone to show patience when asked questions, or when encountering disagreement. Lots of people, including lots of WMF project administrators, do find it hard to show patience. IMO they should try harder.

    Newsflash, administrators, being human, sometimes make mistakes. When administrators lack the patience to offer an explanation, then the hopefully rare instances where they were wrong, and the questioner correct, go unrecognized, and uncorrected.

    Over on enwiki I wrote an essay entitled "nothing is obvious", where I describe an unfortunately common phenomenon. Lots of people try to argue that some things they believe are "too obvious" to require explanation. In my experience, it is those things people regard as too obvious to require explanation that cause the deepest problems. Sometimes not only is the truth of their claim not obvious, their notion is actually not even true.

    When something is truly obvious, it should be trivial to explain.

    When asked to explain something they regard as too obvious to require explanation a common reaction is annoyance, or even an ugly rage. This is what I think the questions I raised triggered from Mr McNeil. Geo Swan (talk) 18:33, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would still appreciate an opinion on the state of health of the wikinews project

Have the number of submissions submitted fallen off, over the last decade?

Have steps been taken to be more welcoming to late-comers? Geo Swan (talk) 18:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The state of the project should be self-evident. There is, as far as I know, no way to track the number of submissions. We delete articles which fail to get published. I suppose the number of submissions are roughly correlated to the number of articles which do get published. However, as we have taken steps to further tighten the review process to ensure accuracy and verifiability, this correlation is probably not one-to-one.
I am aware of no formal step to be "more welcoming" to newcomers as the policy has always been to be welcoming. Has the overall experience for newcomers been good, well, perhaps you could ask them. If you want some names, let me know. Cheers, --SVTCobra 19:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
SVTCobra, in the interests of giving newcomers a friendly, welcoming environment, seems to me we should be protecting newcomers from that one. --Pi zero (talk) 20:20, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
In the case of on-wiki notifications via the welcome-a-bit tool, you can keep a history of legitimate submissions. (I do, in my talk page archive.) Gryllida (talk) 21:16, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Criticism of one's actions -- when necessary -- is vital for team work. Taking things personally isn't. I am sorry if criticism directed at your actions feels for you like people are criticizing you and your intellectual as a person. This is an over generalization and getting rid of it would be fabulous.
Also, I can not do a lot about things which were said in the past. Either they already were apologized for, or someone already decided not to. I find it awfully terrible idea to dig deeper into these issues again and would prefer instead to look at what happens now and what can happen in the future. Preferably with the current content in the Newsroom as energy directed to the new articles and new their talk pages and newcomers user talk pages is highly efficient. Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

13:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

This anonymous IP editing proposal mentioned in the last line is a major change. I've commented on it. --Gryllida (talk) 00:21, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Geolocation is a key tool for enabling anything at all to be known about an IP; without it, IPs would be so untrustworthy they should really just be disallowed altogether. I find it hard to imagine putting in all the effort to compose a comment for the talk page, though; it's obvious the Foundation doesn't care what the community says (which, yes, is disastrous since the community has all the clue). --Pi zero (talk) 00:49, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On collaborative data journalism

https://propublica.gitbook.io/collaborative/ and https://www.propublica.org/nerds/collaborative-data-journalism-guideJustin (koavf)TCM 19:27, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fragile Minds

https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/podcasts/the-wheeler-centre/pen-lecture-fragile-minds. Also https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/fragile-minds_-erik-jensen/11059754Justin (koavf)TCM 21:13, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is it lead or lede?

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/Justin (koavf)TCM 17:24, 18 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

<Oh, one of those.> :p  --Pi zero (talk) 19:09, 18 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

15:21, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

New people

Something reminded me that there may be entities who can be very interested in news writing and benefit from it more than an average individual who learns to think better after some news writing.

  • Uni journalism classes are a good example, as the teacher receives free access to high quality peer review which becomes a part of the education process and can be used in their marking scheme.
  • Primary and high schools can benefit from this, as they often need to study the 5Ws as a part of their standard curriculum in Literacy.
  • Uni computer science people might benefit from this if they do a programming class and do a group assignment to develop a tool that aids authoring or review.

What are other entities that might be interested? I'm just checking as I would be happy to create 'landing pages' for different kind of educators or other groups, and share links to these landing pages with a few institutions in my local area. --Gryllida (talk) 00:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: this is for brainstorming. As many as you can think of would be great to have. Gryllida (talk) 00:02, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Most recently, my own planning for Wikinews has leaned toward two notions:
  • We ought to look for ways to help children learn fact-based thinking; we're not a child-friendly environment, it goes with being uncensored and I certainly wouldn't wish to change that but it's worth some thought to what we might do in that direction.
  • Whatever semi-automated assistance we build for writing articles ("article wizard(s)") should also encourage the writer in fact-based thinking.
Another general line of thought is expressed in a planning essay I drafted not too long ago on Wikibooks: Wikiness. --Pi zero (talk) 00:40, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding children, I think wikis have the advantage (compared with, say, w:Minetest or some other educational games) of transparency. Gryllida (talk) 07:31, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

New tools and IP masking

14:18, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

18:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

I noticed "Wikidata item" moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" yesterday, however, today it seems to have moved back to "Tools". --SVTCobra 16:47, 25 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]