Wikinews talk:Water cooler/proposals

Reversion by Pi zero

Is it against the rules at wikinews to format discussion and make it easier for participants to comment? Ottawahitech (talk) 15:40, 14 December 2017 (UTC) Please ping me

@Ottawahitech: My difficulty with the reformat was that I couldn't tell what-all had been changed. The diff on the edit made it impossible to tell what had changed; the diff algorithm wasn't able to match up almost any paragraphs from before with the ones after. Usually when doing that sort of thing one doesn't touch the comment paragraphs at all, not changing depth of indentation or such — adding artificial subsection headings, only. That would probably produce a readable diff. But, right off hand, if you made a change that hugely disrupts things so that a diff can't even determine whether or not things have been changed in various paragraphs, the simple way to do deal with it is to treat it as redaction of other people's comments and revert it (which is what I did). I suppose if I'd had more time, and the whole discussion had seemed productive, I might have devoted a whole lot of effort to trying to untangle things. --Pi zero (talk) 17:43, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Pi zero: I am disappointed to see you start an edit war. Why did you revert this edit for example? Ottawahitech (talk) 15:54, 16 December 2017 (UTC) Please ping me

@Ottawahitech: I did not intentionally revert that edit; perhaps the software bundled it together with something else. --Pi zero (talk) 16:20, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: It looks as if that edit was not reverted; it's still there on the page. --Pi zero (talk) 16:38, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

WIKINEWS with focus on WIKIs?

Is there a way to dedicate the section just to WIKIs? (be the source of all Wiki related news)--2020W (talk) 07:11, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

We're not a newsletter. See WN:Newsworthiness#The Wikimedia exception. On what we do here, see Wikinews:Pillars of writing. --Pi zero (talk) 13:19, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

I was not thinking primarily of Wikipedia or Wikimedia, but on WIKIs as a topic in technology --2020W (talk) 20:07, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing against our publishing news that's wikis-related, if it needs our newsworthiness criterion. --Pi zero (talk) 20:10, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

@2020W: Other thoughts:

1. Terse items with citations might be added to the Wikipedia article on w:Wiki.
2. There are several articles in Wikipedia that give lists of various things. I refer regularly to w:List of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates and w:List of community radio stations in the United States. I also occasional use w:Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking and similar Wikipedia articles. You might consider starting a similar "list" or "comparison" article. It would not have to be complete. Even a start could be useful even if others don't contribute to it. I added a table on "Selected repositories" to the Wikipedia article on w:Software repository just over a decade ago. That article has averaged just over 300 views per day since 2015-07-01. I think some viewers find that table useful. The reception has not been overwhelming, however, because I left some fields in that table blank. I didn't know enough to put data into those cells. I had hoped that others would fill in the blanks. A few additions have been made to that table, but not many. However, no one has tried to delete it, either ;-)
3. The French-language Wikipedia allows users to create tables from Wikidata. See fr:w:Modèle:Tableau qualificateurs. This might be available in English, but I have not yet figured out how to do it. If you were interested, I could collaborate with you in pestering the Wikidata wizards into helping us port that facility from the French-language Wikipedia into the English-language Wikipedia.
4. If those options are too stringent, original research can be crowdsourced on Wikiversity. I've published several pieces there under Wikiversity:Category:Freedom and abundance. Some of those are what I would call tech reports. Others are interviews with transcripts. For both, the entire world is invited to contribute under the standard Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources. So far, I've attracted some views to some of those articles. None have attempted a major rewrite. I'd like to think that's partly because I try to write from a neutral point of view citing credible sources, while being more adventurous in making comments than might be allowed in Wikipedia.

Hope this helps. DavidMCEddy (talk) 22:14, 25 September 2020 (UTC)