Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2014/August

Just tossing out an idea

I've really had audio boxes on my mind lately.....thus I created this little sandbox bit. Who says/what says we couldn't have an article that's essentially 98% spoken audio? I'm not talking the text of an article read aloud to augment the article one can read right there on the screen.....I mean one or two photos, a headline and then just an audio bit....? We've had photo essays that only had 10-15 words of text attached.....so whey couldn't we do audio, where the audio is the article? .....like a radio news brief? --Bddpaux (talk) 19:37, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

A few thoughts.

• Our existing review process works best with text. We struggle to apply it to audio news briefs — that's why we have the script: so a reviewer can do a preliminary review of the script, drastically reducing the likelihood of a problem that might cause a reviewer to awkwardly not-ready after recording. I think I've twice not-ready'd an audio after recording; it puts the reporter in the nasty position of doctoring the audio and puts the reviewer in the nasty position of putting the reporter in that position. An actual live broadcast is, as has been pointed out, another creature entirely, with nothing to be done except issue corrections after the fact. You want (it's been remarked, iirc) news anchors for that sort of thing — which is to say, people who have frankly experience with it, and who regularly get feedback on what glitches occurred and what could be done better; the whole feedback cycle works differently for that sort of thing and we'd need to put careful thought into how best to handle it (keeping in mind, it's already been a major challenge devising our existing feedback cycle to work on a wiki).

• That's with stuff we compose ourselves, though. There's also stuff where you're carrying a live feed of an event taking place, and then you get to mix the two when you've got on-the-scene coverage with a reporter. These are really interesting questions, to which I for one have few-to-no answers yet (but I'm very much in favor of asking the questions, because we need to not stagnate on any front).

• As a matter of accessibility, we want to provide a transcript of audio content. At its simplest, this is because we can more safely assume that all our readers can read than that they can all hear. (Also, text is way lower bandwidth, and can be consumed in any number of situations where playing sound is out of the question.)

--Pi zero (talk) 20:08, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Very salient points. I cant stop thinking that providing different models/formats on articles help to keep things fresh. Maintaining a true multi media experience can only be a plus, IMO. --Bddpaux (talk) 22:00, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

{{Audio box 2}} is for pretty much exactly that. It slots in just above the infobox in an article. The points Pi zero mentioned, however, mean that it pretty much needs to be an audio recording of a reviewed article, done shortly after the review is complete. We've had people here in the past who would go around to articles, read them, upload the audio, and use audio box 2 on an article for easy accessibility of the audio. However, people come and go on the wiki, and I don't think it's been done for a while. Kamnet was an audio junkie, and he and I spent a fair bit of time making the {{Audio box}} and Audio box 2 templates work properly, in the hope that someone might eventually want to provide audio of articles. Hopefully someone does that, eventually:). — Gopher65_talk 02:47, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

2014 ArbCom Election results

Here are our ArbCom members for 2014:

Election results here. --Bddpaux (talk) 22:21, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

I concur with the assessment by Bddpaux (talk · contribs). Congratulations to all successful candidates. -- Cirt (talk) 05:13, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Context articles

Hi, still new to this wiki, not sure where this question belongs, or if it's an obvious answer.

Does Wikinews have any policies concerning context articles? I'm meaning something that would provide context to a reader just encountering a commonly reported and developing situation. This could, at its simplest, be in the form of a timeline, such as BBC News Onlines timeline of Ukraine crisis including lists of published articles, possibly with short descriptions giving an overview of how topics have developed. Alternatively it could be more detailed, perhaps including an introduction to the subject.

The intention of such a page would be to provide a quick reference for the reader into a developing situation as to past articles and developments relating to an article they've just read.

As I write, it occurs that this could be acheived with a Category, but none of the categories I have thus far encountered contain a description of the subject, and could possibly be enhanced by the inclusion of a description, or the lead, of each article they contain. Also, such categories would eventually reach a point where they are no longer added to.

Hope that makes sense -- CSJJ104 (talk) 23:32, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Context Part of this is addressed by portals and part by RSS feeds in categories and other namespaces which essentially show a timeline of stories. I don't know of a policy about context pieces but I don't see why it's a bad idea as such (especially if you can get any kind of original content, e.g. an interview with someone knowledgeable on the topic). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:05, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

While true categories address this, I was asking about more specific events, e.g. in Category:Ukraine the articles Ukrainian troops retake airfield from separatist militants and Russia stages military exercises as Ukrainian forces advance both clearly related, are divided in the list by articles about, among others, the Deaf Swimming Championships, making it less obvious which stories are directly related, and which are merely related by geographic, or other connections CSJJ104 (talk) 10:15, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

We try not to poach on sister project Wikipedia's territory. Something like a timeline of events related to a crisis, or whatever, as a standalone article, would be encylcopedic, so (the theory goes) it belongs on Wikipedia. Granted, Wikipedia systematically poaches on our territory (with a split between those of them who convince themselves they're not trying to write news, and those who can't see why what they're doing isn't writing news; but I digress). We make a point of not poaching on their territory.

That doesn't prevent us from providing such material in an article. The article has to have a focus that's specific, relevant, and fresh, but within the inverted pyramid style — which I like to think of, in a sort of mixed metaphor, as spiralling outward from the focus — there's flexibility to include various kinds of background. A couple of caveats: we're leery of tabular data, though we do use tables sometimes; and we shouldn't be simply copying a table from somewhere else as that would be copyvio. We've had, though, for example, articles in recent times on sporting events where we had tables with medal counts — how many gold/silver/bronze medals different countries had won, which weren't copyied; that information wasn't being made available elsewhere in convenient summary form (we had to compile the medal counts by going through the lists of who came in what place in each meet, which as you may imagine was "fun" to verify during article review).

An example that comes to mind is Cypriot court clears all of wrongdoing in Greek air disaster (the self-nom of that article for FA described it as "the best English coverage I saw of what should have been a major international story."). --Pi zero (talk) 13:17, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Libyan unrest

I'm wanting to create a category related to the situation in Libya since the 2011 Libyan Uprising but am unsure what to call it. Thoughts? CSJJ104 (talk) 18:31, 28 August 2014 (UTC)