Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/Archive/2

Proposal: remove Copy-edit stage

I think new articles should go straight onto Latest news without being listed for copyedit first. Due to the nature of the beast, any mistakes will probably be picked up on and fixed by the first few readers. This would also remove the delay on good stories reaching the LN and also prevent stories languishing on Copyedit for days! Dan100 09:16, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I strongly support. I think that was always the idea — the copyedit section was mainly for articles that the author (or someone else) felt weren't strong enough to be "published" to latest news yet. -- IlyaHaykinson 09:52, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree! Honestly I think that the 'stage' idea should be further gotten rid of. I think that articles should go right from 'requested' to the main page, with the stub note if they're not complete. I think putting them out like that and not hiding them away makes it look more professional and will make them complete faster. Requested articles, I think, don't have a place on the main page (it could be confusing for non-wiki-ers). Xcjm 01:26, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Further agreement. But also agree there should still be a copyedit section of Article workspace; for Wikinewsies who wish support, such as those for whom english is a second language, that has been a very valuable resource. - Amgine 05:21, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Disagree. Copyedit section is needed. But, the process you are asking for is already the process we have in place. Copyedit is either optional (for writers unsure they are completely done and seek input) or is used by other editors to tag an article that may have style issues or could use some polish by some volunteer. Every day this week at least one story has been listed under both Latest Stories and Copyedit. There is NO reason to remove a story from Latest Stories unless it is a woefully incomplete sub-stub. I will change the description of Copyedit to make this clear. -- Davodd | Talk 10:21, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

By the way, thanks for always keeping the reader and the timeliness of news in mind. -- Davodd | Talk 10:55, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough. Amgine hits the nail on the heard. We'd better adjust the instructions to reflect that. Dan100 1238 at work!

Strongly disagree. The copy edit queue is the first place I go when I hit the site. It's a great place to see articles that are coming up and giving them the once over before releasing from edit embargo. Yes, people can edit articles later. But it really simplifies the process of getting things cleaned up. Otherwise, I would have to hunt down every single article in the Latest News looking for mistakes. Copy editing is kind of my thing, so that's the point of view I'm bringing here, but it really does make a HUGE difference having this little "task list" for me to jump into. Otherwise, it's like trying to drink from a firehose.

Remember Wikinews is a wiki, so pages get fixed naturally. There's also no 'edit embargo'.

OK, that's cool with me. As long as we keep the copy edit section as an option for people seeking help, that's fine. I was objecting to getting rid of it entirely. But the current state of the section, as an option, is fine with me. MikeEdwards 01:50, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Editorial Section

I think that Wikinews should shart a non-radical editorial and opinion section. It would be a good chance to attract good writers and readers. Until yesterday, I only was just looked upon Wikipedia and Wikinews, now I am active and have found it quite fun. Please consider my idea.

In addition, I think that when Wikinews gets more developed, it should have a newsletter and news alerts for catagories of the news. I also agree with a previous post in this section saying we should integrate Wikinews with Wikipedia's Current Events, or else it would just be double work.

There was a poll on this subject very recently (see higher up on the Water cooler). There was no clear consensus, although 'no' votes were in the majority. Many people felt blogs are already an ideal outlet for editorial/opinion pieces. Wikinews is something that isn't done elsewhere - factual news-reporting, by citizen journalists. Dan100 (Talk) 18:09, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

In addition to Dan100's comments, it is currently possible to write your own editorials in your user space. This allows contributors to show editorials are a possible element of Wikinews. - Amgine 21:35, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but what if there was another part of Wikinews that was an appropiate editorial section. Wikinews has a better layout then any other citizen news site and it would be nice to be able to contribute to one site only. In responce to the saying that I can put the editorials on my user page, I will try that, but how do you make those table of contents and how should I go about orginizing my articles. Cafzal 23 Jan 2005

New 'daily pages' system

I'm not too keen on this idea. I can see the reasoning behind it - we get a good system of archiving stories - but it's quite complex and very newbie-unfriendly - already people are putting links in wrong places. There's also the problem that, unless someone re-saves all these pages at the stroke of midnight UTC, all the "edit today's articles" links will point to the wrong place.Dan100 (Talk) 16:26, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually I think I'm wrong above. The "today's articles page" links should actually update automatically every new day, shouldn't they? If so the new system should work rather well :). I think it will take new-comers a while to get used to the nested-template system to list new articles, but hopefully it should improve the archiving of old articles no-end. Dan100 (Talk) 17:27, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I should also say I think it's a good piece of design and must have taken a lot of work to get up and running :). Dan100 (Talk) 18:10, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. It actually took longer than it was supposed to, which is why I didn't get the explanation up here right away. (building the calendar wasn't in the initial plan). Sorry about the confusion.

Related to this is going to be changes to the editor tasks box, including similar templates to build the sections for Developing stories, etc., in both the workspace and the main page. - Amgine 20:51, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

To stop using Wiki Commons as our image source

I officially propose that we institute an Image: upload capability into the Wikinews area and drop the use of Wiki Commons as our default image upload site and article image server since it will harm the depth of our news coverage. The use of Wiki Commons as our image source will hamper us since w:fair use images are not allowed there. It is my belief that news sometimes needs fair use graphics -- case in point: the Wells Fargo and Barclay's rumoured to be in merger talks article in which I inserted a Wells fargo and Barclays logo - which visually helps the story. But since we use Wiki Commons for our image source, this graphic will most likely be deleted, leaving the story text-only. -- Davodd | Talk 10:13, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fair use (or equivalent) provisions vary widely between countries though. Could we find that images which are allowed to be used in one country are not allowed to be used in another? 202.154.105.254 08:55, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Since Wikinews servers (and the foundation) is based in Florida, wouldn't U.S. law apply? -- Davodd | Talk 09:15, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What laws apply to whom and why certainly needs to be clarified. I think we need to get some funds and pay a real lawyer if none can be found who will gratis offer an actual legal opinion that they will stand behind. Legal differences with other wiki projects are significant, as this issue points out. News reporting often gains extra protections regarding copyright, and news reporting is more likely to encounter issues of defamation.

We need at the very minimum to clarify this question of jurisdiction regarding what might threaten the physical server operation, and what potential benefits we may have above what wikipedia has, to decide answers to questions like this one.

I doubt that we can conclusively find an answer for what legal problems/protections might apply to every last contributor in every country, although perhaps we should be starting a set of pages responding to these topics on a place-by-place basis for contributors to reference. Would anyone like to propose a namespace for starting this? or a page or section to discuss the issues.

Also keep in mind that decisions such as this, because of geographical variations in laws, may restrict options of who may mirror the site. Do we take maximum advantage, or opt for maximum flexibility? I suppose some compromise, since we don't want to be bound by laws which apply in China or Iran, but I think should aim to be able to operate equally well in a range of countries with advanced IT infrastructure. -- Simeon 12:32, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Two things; firstly the foundation is trying as hard as it can to internationalise itself, which means that servers right now exist in france as well as florida, and germany is only a month or two away of setting up thier own servers. If memory serves, there has also been talk of setting up branches of the foundation in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan. So this trend is going to change the rules. Also an australian court ruled last year that people who are aiming content at australians must follow Australian law (this court decision has ramifications for all common law countries, ie canada, UK, NZ, and even to a small extent US). Basicly, perhaps we are on solid ground with fair use, perhaps we are not. No one knows till there are a whole bunch of court decisions in a whole bunch of countries. I think it would generaly be better to err on the safer side of caution and not use fair use. The bellman 04:46, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

One of the nice things about using Wiki Commons is that we don't have to worry about licensing or anything--it's known to be good. Otherwise, we have to vet every single image, and that gets to be a real drag. Plus, the more we push using the commons, the more media it will have for us to use. Recently, I needed PD images for an article. I went out, found some, posted them in the Commons, and now we're all the better for it. Just my $0.02. MikeEdwards 21:50, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

1. Mike, some of the Huygens photos you uploaded (including Image:Huygens channels.jpg) are not public domain. Although they were posted on the NASA website, they are co-owned by the European Space Agency and the University of Arizona, both of which hold current copyrights on the images. Scroll to the bottom of the page of the ESA website for copyright claims: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMHB881Y3E_0.html

2. Using Wikicommons means since there is no way to quickly verify the source of original photography, then we must resign ourselves to the notion that Wikinews will for all intents and purposes, be a text-only service unless stock public domain art exists on Wikicommons or was created by the U.S. federal government. This also means that we will probably never have any up-to-datep photos of any people who are not upper-level U.S. government officials (famous actors, businessmen, International diplomts). We also will NEVER be able to use any popular culture photo as a reference, nor will we be able to use a corporate logo for a business story. -- Davodd | Talk 08:25, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Why do most other language Wikinews sites have Upload?

I just noticed that the French, Nederlands, Spanish, and Svenska Wikinews sites all have Upload enabled on their sites.

Only Dutch and English have Upload disabled.

Are there country-specific copyright or licensing issues that allows some sites to allow Upload while others cannot?

I thought all the servers for Wikinews were in Florida?

Is this an oversight or an intentional difference? — DV 10:33, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It was intentional, to allow a replacement logo to be uploaded. The upload is about to be shut off. - Amgine 21:32, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wire Service

As a wannabe webmaster I think it would be nice if somebody could develope a wire service for Wikinews. So people could live feed of headlines on certain topics. Lemme' know what you think. --Tlarson 17:58, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC) | Talk

This idea is good, and I think it was brought up before. It is still not realized, and I am still thinking that it has certain potential.

But I also noticed that some or our contributions seem to have came from people who want to promote certain view, or want to spread particular piece of information to change people's mind. That is, to a various degree, against our policy emphasizing neutral point of view. So not only technologies to offer live feed, but also an institutional mechanism is needed to make sure that we deliver quality news articles along with our values. That is somewhat hard because we often take a day to several days (when the issue is really contentious) to be able to neutralize an article.

Well, if you have further ideas how we could successfully launch the live feed, I am at least interested in listing to it. Tomos 10:46, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This would be great!! WikiRadio!! or even WikiTV, no kidding!! I'm willing to contribute if someone started the projects King Ho Cheung 00:55, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This was brought up recently, and is actively under consideration. However, we do need to develop a stable base of completed articles first, since this is what any broadcast system would be using for source. - Amgine 21:35, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Amen Rome wasnt built in a day. The bellman 07:11, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Tlarson, as far as I can tell, Wikinews is public domain (the foundation hasn't chosen a license yet), so you can use the stories posted on Wikinews directly on your site. If you need a feed, the digests are a serialized view of Wikinews' output. Of course, this would only work if someone were to keep the digests synchronized with each day's latest stories instead of waiting until the end of the week. This wouldn't be fully automated like a RSS feed, but it's a start.

Amgine, how does a stable base of completed articles allow us to do anything more than we can now? Having a large backlog of stories is something to be proud of, but unless we plan on rehashing old news, the main thing holding us back from having any sort of feed, radio, or video broadcast is that we need to increase the volume of new stories that are created during each news cycle.

King Ho Cheun, the Ogg Vorbis audio codec is ready to use today! If you want to create an audio stream, I believe this open source format is acceptable for use on Wikinews. And Theora (the video codec) may go beta this year, which will permit video presentations.

To make this happen, we don't need to build a backlog of old news stories. However, there is a practical concern - the bandwidth constraint all of the Wiki projects are dealing with due to lack of servers, and in the case of video, the lack of an open source format with which to encode the video.

I'm not particularly interested in doing an audio-only stream, but if Wikimedia ever obtains enough funding to handle the bandwidth, I'm not aware of a stated policy which would prevent some wannabe radio show announcer from recording a reading of the latest news into an Ogg audio file and uploading it to Wikimedia Commons.

Once the bandwidth problems are solved, a lot of things become possible. Hopefully the Wikimedia foundation will obtain their 501 IRS exemption soon, which will make it easier to raise funds. — DV 11:34, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I was unclear. Once we have a large base of article production... Which in my opinion we do not yet have. If I remember correctly, 3,000-6,000 words = 90 seconds of broadcast. (It's been a long time, and I may be way off.) The point is, you need a lot of stories just to do the hourly updates which are so popular. And just having new stories is not always useful; you need enough production of finished/polished stories which are unique yet cover broad categories consistently.

I am personally strongly in favour of producing two short hourly updates daily, each a solid 150 seconds of dense news. I know of several webcasters who are searching for exactly such a product. - Amgine 19:53, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I was way off... about 150 wpm is normal speaking pace, more than double possible by professionals. So 1000 words or so for a 5-minute news update.. Do-able. - Amgine 04:00, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Non-homepage "Latest News" rework

Please read User:IlyaHaykinson/On Categories and Topics — I have put the beginnings of this system into test production in South America and Central America. The general idea is that there is one template for a region and topic until we get more editors involved. A single story would (for now) need to get listed three times: once in the main Template:Latest news, once in the region's latest news, and once in the topic's latest news. Any sub-topic or sub-region will just inherit the parent region's latest news via an include until there's a dedicated editing team that is willing to maintain a separate Latest News section for a country.

To see how this works, take a look at South America to see a page, Category:South America to see the category page including the same latest news, Category:Argentina including the same news as well for now, and Template:LocationLatestNews for the basis of the template. I think this system is reasonably good until we get technical features developed in MediaWiki just for us that would let us have auto-generated Latest News listings. -- IlyaHaykinson 10:39, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

very intersting The bellman 07:16, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikinewsies by region/nationality

Wikipedia and Meta have Lots of Useless Lists for people to categorize themselves in, but one list could actually be of use here: a listing by country. Why does Wikipedia:Wikipedians have this but Wikinewsies does not? It's arguably of more use here. (Also, if you don't get user categorization schemes started rightaway, you'll never get them up to date later... :-) JRM 00:52, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Great idea, JRM! {{sofixit!}} - Amgine 03:05, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ha! There's no Template:Sofixit on Wikinews. Template:Soyoufixit! :-) OK, OK, I should have expected this response. *grumble* Since I won't ever be much of a reporter, I'll do gruntwork for you lot. I'm strapped for time on a lot of things, but I'll get this started. I'll port the lists from Meta and the 'pedia as much as possible, since there's quite a bit of overlap between there and here. Of course, I expect you all to come by and register when it's done, or else I'll use Rambot to spam your talk pages. :-) JRM 10:59, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thank you JRM!!one one... The Wikinews:Wikinewsies page is great, and you included the related listings as well! A lot of find/replace on that. Great work! (where's my barnstar collection? Is there an orange one?) - Amgine 03:53, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Simple find/replace, costs only a few keystrokes. No need to haul out barnstars for that. Wait till I get around to fully updating Wikinews:Template messages. :-) There are only a 160 or so uncategorized ones; we should be able to get this done. I'll do 10 today. JRM 13:12, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Newsletter and RSS

We should have individual (Top News, World, US, Science, Entertainment, Politics, Business, ect) RSS and newsletter feeds available to people. I think Wikinews really needs to be recognised more, and while I am bringing up that topic, why don't they use Wikinews instead of Current Events in Wikipedia now that Wikinews is really devoloping, and I must say, with alot more news than the Wikipedia Current Event seciton. Cafzal 23 Jan 2005

I agree, an RSS feed for additions to certain templates (I believe there is one for Special:Recent changes) would be excellent. A lot of people view the 'net through a feed aggregator these days. Dan100 (Talk) 19:19, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is an RSS/Atom functionality to wikinews; I do not know how to use it yet. If someone could figure this out and write a tutorial, perhaps we won't have to re-invent the wheel? On the other hand, this is a great idea; but I want to concentrate on re-building the main page at the moment. - Amgine 19:44, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree, I think an RSS feed would be very useful Saxsux

Categories

We need to add catagories people can access from the front page, I have just realized that not haveing this is not user friendly. I really want to post some science articles, but where can I go to get to the science catagory? I have to spend a good amount of time searching through the arichives and whatnot. Does anyone else share my experiance and how can I access various specific sections easier?

Just search. Dan100 (Talk) 20:07, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Search is nice, but it doesn't give you a list of the possible categoires. I definately agree that we should have a category list on the homepage. [[User::teeks99|teeks99]] 19:32 (UTC), 29 Jan 2005

Hopefully we will shortly, but right now the category system is broken. I agree browsing by category would be nice if you don't want to read only stories mentioning 'Huygens', for example. Dan100 (Talk) 20:08, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Publication date

I would like to suggest adding the publication date of the article, so the reader knows how long the article is at the Main Page. This date could be put at the article's body. Why do I suggest this? I suggest this because anyone can put an unreviwed article at the Main Page. Older articles are more reliable, since maybe a lot of people read them. But what do you say about an article which was published right now? A three hours old article is likely to be more reliable than an ten seconds old article. Other ideas are welcome. It seems the articles at the Main Page are not so reliable because the way we are working now. -- Carlosar 01:46, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Since anyone can put any date they want next to an article, we wouldn't really solve the problem. Besides, we would need to put the time there, and that'd get really confusing due to the time zone not being clear (not everyone knows their UTC offset). Instead I think we need to continue being quick about removing articles from the homepage if they are obviously not ready to be listed there. We have enough people on the site now that this generally happens. -- IlyaHaykinson 03:20, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm with Ilya on this one. However I'd rather legitimate artices (ie potentially news-worthy, just very short) remain on Latest news, in the hope of someone reading it just expanding it. The beauty of Wiki. I think so long as there's a vaild reference on the article, it should stay. Anyone agree or disagree? Dan100 (Talk) 17:59, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I really liked the News Briefs model for short news mentions. It's an easy way to highlight news that's important yet not something that the writer wants to or can expand upon. Some of the news briefs mentions did go on to become full articles. -- IlyaHaykinson 20:46, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I liked that a lot too. I'm thinking about a new layout for main - sections links + weather link at top, section blocks down the middle (60%?), and a right block with a very-latest-news (say, newest 3-5 links), plus news briefs. At the bottom full-width weather, section links again, and the editor tasks. (hmm... I shoulda posted this at Main Page)

Anyway, the News Briefs are a great idea. We need to revive/keep doing. - Amgine 20:59, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Personally I didn't like News Briefs. It often contained one or two lines on each of the biggest stories of the day. I'd rather have seen that effort go into seperate articles - it seems odd for more minor stories to get articles, while bigger news ended up in 'briefs'! I think this was quite possibly happening because people were seeing big news in 'briefs' and thinking the story had been 'covered', so then not starting an individual article on the subject. Dan100 (Talk) 21:38, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

An Alternate way of doing it is to write the big story, then a 'teaser' brief with a link to the larger article? - Amgine 19:41, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Number of days on Latest news

Someone changed it from seven to four, presumably to make the main page a bit shorter. Seems fair enough to me, I doubt many people are that interested in news more than four days old. However I put it up to five as it looks a little more impressive and five just seems a nicer number than four. Dan100 (Talk) 23:37, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

When I was taking publication design courses, we learned theories ranging from Japanese aesthetics to Gestalt theory. Basically we were told when placing elements in a composition to use odd numbers such as one, three, and five. This will better result in a sense of relaxed, natural asymmetry. Upon seeing an even-numbered grouping, the human mind works harder and for some reason feels the need to either count the individual elements, divide the group in half looking for symmetry or search for pattern clusters. With even-numbered elements, the impact of the layout tends to overpower the content. -- Davodd | Talk 08:03, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That was me... and I was trying to keep the columns at least similar in length. I like the comments about asymmetry; we should definitely think about this with the new page layout. - Amgine 19:37, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"Categories" vs. "Search"

Which should we use?

Due to the current limitations of the categories system, and the lack of man-power to keep 'aggregator' pages bang-up-to-date, I propose that we fully embrace a "flat directory" (FD) search-based style.

The FD concept (there's probably a proper name but I don't know it) revolves around using search. The likes Google Desktop, iTunes, Furl, and of course Google itself, are built around the idea that it doesn't matter where information is stored, as long as you can find it when you need it. It's a fairly new concept but I believe it's the future of much of information management

On WN, you can view all the latest news for the last few days on Latest news. If a visitor wants to find something specific, I suggest we should highlight the methods available to search the site (eg google site search, or our own when it's working), rather than directing to them to category or 'aggregator' page, then having to dig through sub-pages etc. Dan100 (Talk) 12:34, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Amgine and I have been working on an extension to create automatic dynamic lists of articles based on a union of categories (i.e. "all articles for 'Spain' in 'Politics and conflicts'", or "last ten articles from January 12, 2005"). You can see this extension in action at http://www.ilya.us/wiki/ — we are trying to find developers to put this extension in production at wikinews and will know soon if that'd be possible. See mediazilla:1411. -- IlyaHaykinson 22:55, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Go for it! The way to use extension is to use a custom tag, <DynamicPageList>, with various settings to decide which categories the articles must belong to. Go ahead and copy some articles and play with it. - sig lost due to an un-closed tag earlier :o

That's pretty cool, though you could do with some actual content on your test site (copy and paste WN stuff? It's public domain) to illustrate how it works a little more clearly. Dan100 (Talk) 19:22, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I liked the feature very much, so I voted for it. In case some of you are not aware, you can register with the site, and vote for Mediazilla:1411 or anything else you want to express your desire to the developers (although I am not sure how much the votes weigh in developers' prioritizing of their tasks.)

Thank you for Ilya and Amgine for developing the feature. Tomos 00:05, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Category region pages

I have just started/had a go at merging old static region pages with (fantastic! thanks Ilya) new automated category-based region pages. The advantage of this is a) right now we have both, and it's confusing, b) the automated ones are the ones people will reach when they click on the category links at the bottom of an article. Therefore, that is the one I have merged 'to'.

So far I have done Oceania and had a start on Africa, South America really already seemed to have moved themselves, so I just put in a redirect.

Europe, North America, Asia, Middle East .. others .. all still need to be done. Does anyone not understand what I mean? Please have a look, and if possible, have a go at moving your page if you work on one of these pages, or have a go at tidying up the ones that are already done .. I left some inconsistencies, wasn't sure what is best .. put explanation into Oceania but left out of South America, I think without is cleaner, but perhaps not intuitive enough to users?

Please provide suggestions if you think something is awry.

Some region categories could perhaps be broken up or made into two levels, eg Africa hints at a possible two-tiered structure, but I didn't actually implement it. South America I may have removed useful content by removing the wikipedia links, but otoh these would be better in the category page of each country .. but I didn't get to there yet. Simeon 20:15, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikinews and Wikipedia Current Events

Cafzal and I are trying to promote Wikinews on WP, read our efforts, and please join in! Dan100 (Talk) 22:22, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikinewsie listings

I've copied the structure of the regional and alphabetical listings of w:Wikipedia:Wikipedians to Wikinews:Wikinewsies. Please consider adding yourself to these lists.

I have toyed with the idea of transferring information from Meta and Wikipedia, but considered against it for two reasons:

1. These lists are supposed to be voluntary. While I can't imagine much harm coming from copying an existing listing, it is still a bit dubious.
2. There's no way to be sure an account on Meta or Wikipedia will match one on Wikinews, even though this will apply in 99% of all cases.

So, updating these listings is up to the community.

Incidentally, I'd like a statement on the welcome message asking people to consider adding themselves to these lists. Unfortunately, I can neither find this welcome message nor a page listing the templates in use on Wikinews. Wikinews:Template messages is a careless and fairly useless copy of the Wikipedia page. If anyone can give me pointers on this, I'd be grateful. JRM 20:58, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Update: I've cleaned up Wikinews:Template messages and found {{Welcome}}. The plea to add yourself to the list is not appropriate there, however. Hmm. JRM 01:01, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

New days

How do new days get added to the latest news thingo. Is it automagic, or does an admin do it. If its automagic, can i request that it uses the international date line, cause its frequently a day behind for me (being an aussie), which also makes adding new articles difficult, cause it adds them to a date which is not yet on the main page. If its done by admin, ill just have to wait till there is an aussie (or NZ) admin. The bellman 10:44, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Days are added manually, and anyone can do it: just edit Template:Latest news. -- IlyaHaykinson 18:04, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Oh well, thats easier than i thought it would be. Good-o. The bellman 04:51, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Titles

Hey everyone. I had a problem with one of the articles today: PEI to become GMO free zone?. The problem is, WN is sort of an international newssite and you cant expect people all over the world to know local acronyms. When you read something like that on the main page you actually get no usefull information on what the article could be about at all. Bolivia rejects Chile's OAS candidate is a little better because at least I get to know what part of the world it is all about.

So, can we have some sort of policy agreement to caution people from using double acronyms in the title?

Floflei6 00:25, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I agree entirely. Article titles, at least until the category system is implemented, need to define the geographical area the story originates from (if there is one, ie not science or astronomy). Beyond that, article titles need to be as specific as possible as we can only use each one once.

Flo, if you come across a title you don't like in the future again, don't be afraid to change it by using the 'move' tab. However, you must also change the listing on the day page the article is listed on. Dan100 (Talk) 20:12, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Look under the Wikinews:Style book under headlines. I suggest you move and rename the article to be more clear. -- Davodd | Talk 20:45, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Another option is to use the piped link, for example [[PEI to become GMO free zone?|Prince Edward Island to become Genetically Modified Organism free zone?]] looks like "Prince Edward Island to become Genetically Modified Organism free zone?". This is an easy way to display better headlines (or very different ones) without possibly breaking links, etc. - Amgine 19:55, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)