Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals

Page last updated: Sunday 22 at 0308 UTC.

Markup for developing articles and the review process

Latest comment: 1 month ago7 comments3 people in discussion

I think that we can improve the article-development and review processes by using markup to clearly and effectively communicate between author and reviewer before publishing an article.

I have created {{Verify}} as a first attempt. From the documentation: "It can be used to indicate the source of a specific statement or it can be used to indicate that a statement needs a source."

I propose that if the template is useful, we consider requiring its use by authors to facilitate/speed-up the review process. What are your thoughts? —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 16:38, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I would oppose this in published version, we don't use inline citations here. Gryllida (talk) 22:32, 20 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

It doesn't seem intended for use in the main published version, as noted in the documentation, but rather for the developing stage. Asked42 (talk) 10:30, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

This approach seems more effective than using HTML comments to indicate which information is sourced from where. Asked42 (talk) 10:36, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Asked42 is correct. I should have been more clear here. The proposed template is not meant to remain in published articles. And I too think it is better than hidden HTML comments as its presence and even lack of presence shows both the author and the reviewer important information about the state of a draft article. For example, if a statement or paragraph does not have a source indicated, the author can see they need to (temporarily) cite a source for the reviewer.

I think this will be a huge help in the review process if authors provide exact links to the sources they've used for every piece of information that must be verified. Currently, reviewers must search all sources for a single statement, not knowing which article contains the information. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:52, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I utilized {{Verify}} to indicate statements as I verified them during a review in this previous version of a published article. That version of the article would be an example of how it would look to an author if I had for some reason failed the review and returned it to the author(s) for further edits and improvements. The author(s) can clearly see the statements I have verified.

Again, to reiterate; these markings are not meant to exist after publication. These are meant to facilitate communication between authors and reviewers during the developing and review processes. My primary goal is for authors to utilize this template to preemptively point reviewers to exactly what source they used for a given statement. This will hopefully reduce the amount of back-and-forth between reviewers and authors, a process that can easily consume days of precious time. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 18:18, 22 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

FYI,side note, often a thing is verified through multiple sources. Gryllida (talk) 09:31, 24 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

undo global sysops wiki status

Latest comment: 7 days ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Proposing to undo global sysops wiki status as a sysop (me) is available at least once daily, often for a few hours, and spam does not accumulate in long term anymore. Your insight would be much appreciated. Gryllida (talk) 22:33, 20 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Too soon to review. Let's still give global sysops a chance, shan't we? George Ho (talk) 22:39, 20 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks and when would you suggest to review this in future? Gryllida (talk) 02:46, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I agree with George. Given our lack of active reviewers, one active admin who is also a reviewer is one person spread too thin. We are desperate for more active reviewers as well as active admin. There are 77 changes that need to be sighted by an admin.[1] Two of those pending changes, which are not visible unless the reader is signed in, are corrections to edit-protected articles. The oldest of those corrections is two weeks old. We have 12 changes that are required by an admin before we can upgrade our two-generations-old copyright license.[2] There are 29 pages marked for speedy deletion.[3] There are 43 articles from 2024 that are published but not archived. Roughly ten of those should be left on the main page so 33 need to be archived. One active admin is not nearly enough to accomplish what we need to accomplish. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:40, 21 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think it would be heap easier if you walked me through this on IRC as I can shorten that queue a bit but have no clue how some of these things work. Asking on wiki, we just wait for an answer for a few hours often. Gryllida (talk) 09:33, 24 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

@George Ho see WN:IRC please. I am happy to give you access to my w:Quassel. Thanks. Gryllida (talk) 09:34, 24 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Gryllida, I just spotted your message above from October. I didn't get notified of it, even though the page is on my watchlist. I've now subscribed to the discussion, maybe that will help.

If you were asking me to get on IRC to walk you through this, I'm afraid I won't be of any help. I'm not an admin and don't know the mechanics of deleting files or archiving articles. I do know that the list of articles on the Main page is a DPL that excludes articles in Category:Archived so I suspect that it could be as easy as following the guidance of Wikinews:Archive conventions and then that long list on the Main page would be reduced to non-archived articles (i.e., all articles published in the previous seven days or the last ten articles, whichever is larger).

The edits of protected pages should have instructions for the edit in the talk page. For the list associated with the license upgrade project, we have instructions as well as examples here: Wikinews:2024_Copyright_license_upgrade#Pages_to_update_when_license_is_updated_from_2.5_to_4.0. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:46, 22 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

No way. Leaderboard (talk) 09:29, 14 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Grant project for Wikinews

Latest comment: 4 days ago13 comments7 people in discussion

Following up on Wikinews:Water cooler/technical#Can and should en.Wikinews be revitalized, I would like to propose that we address the social/technical/financial underinvestment in Wikinews by actively seeking outside grants. The affiliate that I'm part of, m:Wikimedia New York City, would like to help with this process, and to develop a grant proposal in consultation with the English Wikinews community.

Wikinews has so much to offer the world, and I think it just needs some investment and experimentation with new ideas to help it fulfill its potential. I'd suggest the following areas to be potentially supported by a grant:

Developing a w:Social news website functionality
Integrating more closely with Wikipedia, particularly w:Wikipedia:In the news and the daily w:Portal:Current events
Wikidata items for new stories across publications, tying into the larger knowledge graph
Better communications channels, and community support through editing events/contests
Working with students and journalism schools, working on Wikinews as a class assignment
Annex for newsworthy topics that don't fit Wikipedia notability
Regional and topical newsdesks and feeds
Explore creative but responsible uses of AI

All of this would emphasize and build on Wikinews' strong NPOV and human-centered collaborative tradition. This vision would also strengthen the traditional Wikinews mode of articles with a fixed publication date, while also enabling other modes of development and access to news-related information. Pharos (talk) 18:37, 19 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Social news website - suggest off-wiki - probably w:Lemmy
Wikipedia news integration - suggest last on the list after everything else is fixed due to previous issues (they have a large issue with Wikinews lacking 'assume good faith' approach where instead 'never assume' is preferred, and with the low pass rate of new sensible news articles)
Wikidata maybe OK, I'm not experienced
Better communication channels - official media is IRC - I am willing to help by providing access to my w:Quassel for testing - for long term use I suggest finding somewhere else to host. Or I could help with self hosting Matrix.
Sounds great I am happy to make some additional documentation for students i.e. video tutorial
That's original reporting, indeed not eligible for Wikipedia. Can be highly local news or exclusive content
Same as above, bit more challenging
Happy to collaborate with you on this

Gryllida (talk) 03:50, 20 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

(FYI, the Lemmy page you linked to on enwp links to the article on w:Ian Fraser Kilmister, if you want to change it to w:Lemmy (social network) ^^) PixDeVl (talk) 23:33, 23 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

I believe there's a lot of untapped potential. And WMF has been funding journalist organizations through several rounds of meta:Knowledge Equity Fund (media-related organizations are in 3 out of 6 funded projects in round 1, 2 out of 7 projects in round 2, 5 out of 13 projects in round 3). Yet can anyone tell me if any of these projects collaborated with Wikinews? I don't know this community well but I am pretty confident in putting my bet at 0. In fact, in the project report produced by Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (round 1 recipient), they laid it out clearly on first page of the report that they have 0 new images/media added to Wikimedia articles, 0 articles created/improved on Wikimedia projects, and 0 bytes of value added to Wikimedia projects. What on earth is WMF paying them $850,000 for? Another round 1 recipient, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), reported that they published articles elsewhere. Why aren't they (ARIJ) publishing it in Wikinews? Why isn't WMF imposing a condition such that the journalism-area grant recipients must publish their articles in Wikinews in addition to other places they preferred? I haven't combed round 2 or round 3 recipients' reports but I expect similar outcomes. Wikinews community should grab their pitchforks, speak up and demand answers from WMF grant team on why they didn't impose conditions for projects that closely align with Wikinews. Given that the Knowledge Equity Fund is continuing to fund media and journalism organization, I think this is a lower hanging fruit than requesting grants specifically for Wikinews. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 21:55, 21 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for pointing out this potential connection to the Knowledge Equity Fund! Actually, what I had thinking about principally was not applying to WMF at all, but rather to independent philanthropies interested in the future of journalism. Still, it makes a lot of sense to build up this connection, and though I think WMF were unsure about how to navigate it in the past, maybe we can make it clear that Wikinews is indeed now open for such collaborations. Pharos (talk) 01:22, 22 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

For what it's worth, as I mentioned the better part of a decade ago, I have done professional grant writing and I'm motivated to work together with a group looking to prepare a grant proposal. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:27, 22 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Wikinews community should grab their pitchforks... That would be about four pitchforks at the moment. Is the thought that an influx of limited funds for limited projects would increase our user base? Is there a concern that with too few active users we won't qualify for said funds?

At en.WN we have a unique role; the Reviewer, which is critical to getting articles published using the outdated and no-longer-supported[4] Flagged Revisions. Without enough Reviewers, en.WN is dysfunctional. I believe that is where we need to first focus our attention; increasing the number and effectiveness of reviewers. In the context of grants and funds, I don't know what that looks like. Training? —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 15:02, 22 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

As mentioned above, "working with students and journalism schools" could in principle result in long-term editors (not necessarily likely, but certainly possible) or it could be a situation where the existing user base can move more to reviewing than actual writing and newer editors can focus on writing. Agreed tho that this project is unique among all the WMF projects where there is a critical mass that is needed to be even functional. At, e.g. s:, you can take an indefinite amount of time to keep on adding source texts and while a library is best when it has a lot of entries, at least having a few is a good start and you keep building it up over time and it just becomes more and more useful (this is also how Project Gutenberg has worked). But at a news site, stories cease to be news over time. We're falling behind in a more radical way than any other project is or could be. Projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary are getting closer to their goals of being comprehensive, general interest encyclopedias and dictionaries/thesauruses, etc. but Wikinews is only getting worse off. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:57, 22 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Michael.C.Wright To be fair, Wikinews doesn't speak up, nobody even knows you guys are grabbing your pitchforks (or that there's 0 individuals willing to grab a pitchfork). Imagine if a grant proposal requests for funding to take photos but the photos don't get uploaded to Commons, that proposal wouldn't get approved. If I were a Wikinews participant, I would strongly demand WMF (and the board of trustees) that funded journalism organizations has to contribute articles in Wikinews. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 21:59, 29 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Update: Wikimedia NYC has now actually applied for our first Wikinews-related grant, taking the form not of money but of a student tech project with Cornell Tech through the Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship. We presented it as one of three possible projects for a student fellow to work on, right now we're just waiting to see if students are willing to step up for any of our proposed projects. Pharos (talk) 16:34, 11 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Great thanks Pharos. Gryllida (talk) 20:37, 15 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Phraos has graciously roped be in to this crazy idea. I've been itching to do some original reporting that isn't on my own blog and have it be seen as associated with an outlet. Coming from WMNYC, I see potential to contribute to NYC-focused stories. I've been calling myself a press photographer for the chapter lately, having done a lot of work on the Trump Trial and other news-y events. I'd really want to get a grant to be able to spend time doing this, though; housing in the US is expensive, and even more so here. SWinxy (talk) 06:41, 16 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

We would love to have you! We could desperately use some original reporting.

Feel free to jump in at any time and start to learn the ropes by starting your first article. 👍 Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:48, 17 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Introducing Let’s Connect

Latest comment: 6 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello Wikinews editors,

I hope that you are in good spirits. My name is Serine Ben Brahim and I am a part of the Let’s Connect working group - a team of movement contributors/organizers and liaisons for 7 regions : MENA | South Asia | East, South East Asia, Pacific | Sub-Saharan Africa | Central & Eastern Europe | Northern & Western | Latina America.

Why are we outreaching to you?

Wikimedia has 18 projects, and 17 that are solely run by the community, other than the Wikimedia Foundation. We want to hear from sister projects that some of us in the movement are not too familiar with and would like to know more about. We always want to hear from Wikipedia, but we also want to meet and hear from the community members in other sister projects too. We would like to hear your story and learn about the work you and your community do. You can review our past learning clinics here.

We want to invite community members who are:

Part of an organized group, official or not
A formally recognized affiliate or not
An individual who will bring their knowledge back to their community
An individual who wants to train others in their community on the learnings they received from the learning clinics.

To participate as a sharer and become a member of the Let’s Connect community you can sign up through this registration form.

Once you have registered, if you are interested, you can get to know the team via google meets or zoom to brainstorm an idea for a potential learning clinic about Wikinews or just say hello and meet the team. Please email us at letsconnect@wikimedia.org . We look forward to hearing from you :)

Many thanks and warm regards,

Let’s Connect Working Group Member

Serine Ben Brahim (talk) 11:01, 9 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I emailed and got no response so far. Gryllida (talk) 20:37, 15 December 2024 (UTC)Reply