Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2013/January

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Brevity

Elephants! So darned hard organising a cocktail party around these beasts!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a trait shared by most Wikinewsies is valuing brevity. The ideal style for writing news is to provide the highest signal-to-noise ratio possible; less 'fluff', more facts.

This aesthetic naturally spills over into namespaces for discussion, where a 'Wikipedian' desire to "educate from kindergarten level" impedes news production and, generally, makes otherwise-intelligent people who 'get' the Wikinewsie outlook want to break something.

This is, as-best I can currently express, the reasoning behind creating this essay. There is a need to find, and catalogue, ways of saying "Stop, this does not work" in response to 'Wikipedian' debating styles which lead nowhere; such assumes the encyclopedic lack of time constraints to produce the ideal article. News will never have that, and I'm getting tired of trying to explain this. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 22:10, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I fully concur. I noted a tidbit from Strunk on that page. I think, if one will review a later version, the dictum is (technically speaking), "Omit needless words." My God, I love that sentence. --Bddpaux (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Crat nom

Although announced at the sitenotice, perhaps there should be a notice at the cooler as well. We don't, after all, have crat nominations terribly often on en.wn.

Pi zero has been nominated for use of the Bureaucrat tools. Please provide your input.

(Okay, I feel a little silly posting this notice myself, but, meh.) --Pi zero (talk) 17:53, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]