Wikinews talk:How do I ... ?

More tasks

These aren't formatting, so will want some other major heading.

• Update a published article.

Largely, though not entirely, concerned with when you start a new article instead.

• Refresh an unpublished article that has gone stale.

--Pi zero (talk) 18:51, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Wishing to help

Hi all. Been going through Wikinews's documentation recently after being inactive for a while to remind myself. Does anyone object to me editing this page, subject to others edits, of course? If not, can I check I've understood its purpose. My understanding is it is meant as I quick reference guide for writing articles, and might also have a similar use to an FAQ for a newbie? --CSJJ104 (talk) 21:30, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

@CSJJ104: Well, you could try. Not much was done on this, evidently, after the initial spate of activity. For perspective: It seems we've made a number of tentative efforts over the years, some of which have been more successful than others. The two I regularly refer people to these days are WN:PILLARS and WN:WRITE, which I think have been pretty successful. {{Howdy}} was imho always a great intro in the old days, then at some point I suggested we try to change it so it'd give a super-short step-by-step how-to on writing an article, which brianmc did pretty well but I'm not convinced it's made any difference — apparently, each sister project goes to a lot of trouble to provide new users with exactly what they need in their welcome message and, in return, pretty much no new users ever read the various project's welcome messages. (I once got yelled at, on English Wikibooks, by a new user for putting a welcome message on their user talk; they complained bitterly that they'd been to many different projects and they all insisted on cluttering their user talk pages with welcome messages.) I've wondered whether we should change {{Howdy}} back, but then, the new version has some plusses too; and maybe we need yet a third approach, like something that doesn't say "Welcome" but instead says something like "Things you need to know" or such. Then there's Wikinews:Article wizard, which was my attempt to build an article wizard akin to Wikipedia's, but I realized in building it that it wasn't really much use because any interactivity is make-believe; so I've poured vast effort in the years since then into creating tools so that wiki markup really does become interactive — and I'm just about getting there now, too; WN:Assistant, Help:Dialog. --Pi zero (talk) 22:03, 15 May 2016 (UTC)