Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals

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Have your say template

The {{haveyoursay}} template which appears below each published article looks like this:

How about we change it to include the option to request missing information which Wikinewsies could investigate via original reporting in a separate article. This could engage the readers into asking for more reporting to be made, and consequentially this could result into engaging them into reporting themselves. This can be done either via mw:Extension:ArticleFeedbackv5, which could be further customized to ask for something more news related than the text provided by default:

Or by writing the haveyoursay template like this for example:

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Can the article be improved, or more information reported? Share your suggestion!

--Gryllida (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Interacting with the readers? That's something that traditional newspapers very nearly can't do. We could always try it for a couple of months and see how it works.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" is the question that tech support web pages ask to see if their search engines are accurate enough and "improve" suggests we're going to change that article right there, so maybe that's not the best exact wording. We're asking humans to talk to humans... And we're not suggesting that the article was incomplete so much as asking them where else they'd like to go. We're asking for more like "What kind of follow-up do you want?"

"Where do we go from here?" "Does this article leave you wanting more?" "Do you want to see Wikinews dig deeper into this issue?" I'm sure more will come to me. Darkfrog24 (talk) 21:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikinews mission is to encourage participatory journalism. Traditional newspapers can do it if their editor takes comments from readers and works with them as writers.

Perhaps "Found a mistake? Anything missing that we could find and report? Share your suggestion!" --Gryllida (talk) 22:48, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

"Found a mistake" sounds like it's inviting our readers to correct our grammar and punctuation. Maybe "See something wrong with our facts?" if we want to direct them to substance. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:34, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Mistakes can be factual. Gryllida (talk) 22:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Some miscellaneous thoughts (such as can get past this flu).

• We don't want a heavy template. We've always had a light template offering users the opportunity to comment on the issues surrounding the news story. Anything whose purpose is instead to invite comment about article-writing should be very modest, and carefully not to be confused with the other.
• The purpose of the opinions (comments) page is to discuss the issues surrounding the news reported by the article. The purpose of the collaboration (talk) page is to discuss article composition. Feedback on possible OR is a talk thing rather than a comments thing.
• Not all articles use {{haveyoursay}}; some use the left or right variant instead. We've rarely used those lately, so for a limited experiment this is negligible.
• No, it does not make sense to put a suggestion on every article to expect mistakes. I see how the idea could have popped up in this brainstorming, but let's nip it in the bud.
• The one about digging deeper has a certain appeal, from a phrasing perspective; per above, though, we need brevity.

--Pi zero (talk) 23:37, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

1) To make these two things separate, perhaps a second template called {{suggest what to report}} could be positioned after the sources section, then? It could say 'Suggest topic for a further report' or some other phrase that has a similar meaning.

2) I would like readers to share their thoughts so I added a text box. If without the tabber, then it looks like this:

--Gryllida (talk) 23:51, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

If without the textbox, after the sources section a template could read like this:

--Gryllida (talk) 23:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

In regards to the above discussion, it would be interesting for me to know why you suggest that any invitation like this should be modest. It is my understanding that, on the contrary, we want to invite the readers into the writing process as much as possible. --Gryllida (talk) 23:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I like the second one more than the first one...

"Want us to dig deeper? Have an idea for a follow-up article? Suggest one here!"

Gryllida, can you state flat-out what you want the readers to do? Do you want them to recommend more articles? Is this a sideways way of recruiting more drafters by bringing them through an article-suggestor larval phase (hallelujah, by the way, we need more people)? Or do you just want to stimulate more discussion with a more inviting path to our existing comments structure? Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:05, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

The primary purpose of a news article is to report the news. Inviting discussion of the topic is good, inviting interest in further reporting is good, but those aren't the primary purpose of that page. --Pi zero (talk) 00:59, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I am thinking of using Wikinews to write of political parties prior to an election: we ask all candidates about 10 questions and they reply and it becomes a report; readers suggest another dozen of questions and it becomes another report. Not sure what is the best format for this and whether this should be done on-wiki or not. Gryllida (talk) 03:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Seems a separate concept. Also, depending on what one has in mind, it sounds as if it could weaken our vetting process in a way especially likely to lose neutrality. We aren't here to provide a campaign platform for any political candidate. An interview goes through our whole vetting process before being published, and thereby we remain neutral. --Pi zero (talk) 11:14, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that's a problem for writing about politics, but Gryllida's core idea of getting the readers to recommend the next article could work in some form. Maybe try it with something less fraught and then, if feasible, give politics a go. Darkfrog24 (talk) 15:55, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I was expecting people to propose further questions to the candidates at the talk page and then we select which ones to put in the next report. Gryllida (talk) 17:58, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Thus making it an aspect of what we want to be covered by the template. Hmm. --Pi zero (talk) 18:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Indeed :-)

It appears that placing it separately is better, and of the two people who participated in this discussion none were really excited about the thought of adding the text box.

I'd suggest to use the last example I gave above, and place it after the sources.

Would you agree that this is the best solution out of the options considered above? Gryllida (talk) 22:40, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't have strong feelings about one or the other. I think we should implement it and see what happens. We can always change it later.

I think the next issue is how can we tell when someone's replied? With a talk page on an article draft, you can tell when someone's posted because it's no longer red, but there's no way to tell in-article whether anyone has started a comments page thread. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

I trust we'll take plenty of time to get this right before acting; the project has been here fourteen years, review has been here ten years, we can afford the time, for this. --Pi zero (talk) 23:32, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. Gryllida (talk) 23:49, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Via Echo or talk page messages (or both). Gryllida (talk) 23:46, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

No, I mean for the equivalent of someone just walking by. Like if I'm in the Newsroom, I can see that there's an article in the development hopper for me to add to. No one has to send me specifically a message and I don't have to go to a specific talk page; it's easy to see.

The opposite of that is the comments/opinion pages we have on articles. The only way to find out if anyone has left a comment/opinion is to click on each and every opinion section of each and every article, and that's tiresome. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:03, 4 April 2019 (UTC)