Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2022/June

Roe v Wade and access to abortion in the United States

I believe that this story has the potential of drawing a whole new segment of readers to wikinews, which I assume everyone here wants.

Roe v Wade has been been considered a legal standard in the United States for over 50 years. However, a decision from the United States Supreme Court is expected soon that may change that. See: Bans off Our Bodies protests occur across United States after leaked Supreme Court draft

I would like to suggest this topic for a prepared story on Wikinews. Any objections? thoughts? Speculation?

Ottawahitech (talk) 14:21, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

No objection at all -- would still need to pass review when the event occurs, but anyone is free to write up a prepared story, keeping the instructions at Wikinews:Story preparation in mind. LivelyRatification (talk) 22:59, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for responding @LivelyRatification. I initially came to Wikinews with the intention starting some sort of prepared story, but couldn't figure out how to do it. True, I did not spend a lot of time trying to figure it out, but I was hoping to catch the eye of an experienced newsie, since I do not want to write an article myself.

I see that the newsroom has a section title prepared stories and following the link I come to a category with a link at the top to Wikinews:Story preparation, which has the following section:

1 Previous prepared articles

2 Current preparation

3 Article templates

4 Obituaries

My time is limited, so I went to the section Article templates and chose In the simplest: {{Prepare}}, without stopping to look at anything else. But now I am stuck because the instructions say to add the template to the top of the page. What page?

I hope I am making sense? Ottawahitech (talk) 13:15, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: Well, you'd have to create the page yourself. Say, in this example, it might be Wikinews:Story preparation/US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade decision, and add the {{prepare}} tag to the top of that, and start filling in the prepared story based on information we know now and informed guesses about what the decision will look like. If you don't want to write the article yourself, that's totally fine, but in that case it'll rely on someone else willing to fill it in. If you just want to suggest a story for someone else to write, I'd suggest going to Wikinews:Requested articles. LivelyRatification (talk) 20:14, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@LivelyRatification, thank you for this, and all the other help you have extended on WN. I don't really want to make any commitments at WN until "stale" is taken care of. I have been visiting WN for years, on and off, and it has always been my experience that many good articles were lost because they could not get reviewed on time. What's more it was impossible for me to learn-on-the-job because reviews were lost together with the several "stale" articles I managed to produce. I hope I am making sense? Ottawahitech (talk) 19:56, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Completely get that, and I've had similar frustrations in the past. I'm not entirely sure what can be done re: staleness, but given the severe shortage of reviewers we have, I do feel like things can't keep going on like they are. LivelyRatification (talk) 21:17, 14 June 2022 (UTC)