User talk:Pi zero

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Reporters were supposed to tell what happened; scholars explained what had happened.
— Theodore H. White

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Thx for deleting spam

I was surprised to learn that I had had a User page on Wininews, and you had deleted it. Upon investigation, I found that you had concluded that it was spam. The page was created from IP address was 94.27.69.108. That's in Kiev, according to https://www.iplocation.net/. I suppose any user page that is not create by a user logged in is likely spam -- especially if it's created from Kiev? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 21:47, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: Yes, I see it was an ad, in French, for some sort of medicine to treat erectile dysfunction. --Pi zero (talk) 21:57, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I'd be interested in your reactions to my Submission for Wikimania2017: Submissions/Building Wikinews into the premier news site worldwide DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:13, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: I see you wandering, unaware (I suspect), into a minefield — an explosively controversial issue that has wound about Wikinews for all the years I've been here (and presumably years before I arrived). I will try to write up a description of the history from my perspective (if I can find the time; I really will try); I think perhaps I'll put that on your user talk page, rather than here. --Pi zero (talk) 12:06, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

(Or maybe I'll put it here after all; it seems it shouldn't be separated from the start of the conversation, so if I do decide to put it on your talk page I'd need to bring the above remarks with it.) --Pi zero (talk) 13:01, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

The world needs something, I think. The minefield you mentioned may be why Jimmy Wales decided to launch WikiTribune as a project completely separate from the Wikimedia foundation. The description I've seen so far of WikiTribune seems far too restricted to address the need I see -- and what I think should be possible. However, it may be easier to launch a completely separate project than grow either Wikinews or WikiTribune to meet that need.  ???

In any event, we need a free and open discussion of this someplace, and I think that a "Birds of a Feather" session at Wikimania 2017 should be a good place for a face-to-face encounter on this.

If you'd like to edit my draft submission for Wikimania 2017, you can do so at Submissions/Building Wikinews into the premier news site worldwide

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:12, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: I have no particular reason to think Jimmy Wales has a clue about the minefield. I have never seen him show any deep understanding of news, nor of Wikinews particularly. He certainly didn't come here to discuss the Wikitribune concept, which I suspect is a step backward from Wikinews in some important ways as he failed to take advantage of available in-house wisdom. I'm not crazy enough to think Wikinews is perfect, and I also don't envision some sort of citizen-journalism monoculture — I'm happy to find room in the world for a variety of different thing being tried. That is not to say he isn't stepping in the middle of... at this point, the "minefield" metaphor no longer works, I'm thinking of something more like stepping squarely into the middle of a large cow pat. I've heard his plan for wikitribune is making belated use of something described to him ten years ago by a proponent of an alternative vision for Wikinews — though I've also heard some pretty pessimistic predictions from that party about wikitribune; so it seems that folks with different philosophies for Wikinews share a dim view of wikitribune.

Alas, I don't think there's any way I could be there. I don't have a passport; at the time of 9/11 I had already let it lapse, and once 9/11 happened I resented the police state GWB was creating and wasn't at all enthusiastic about dealing with it to renew my passport. So my heart isn't really into trying to renew my passport now; and I'm not at all sure it could happen before August anyway. Plus, I see the new Code of Conduct that the WMF is forcing on the community, and feel about it much way I do about GWB's police state; that makes it less likely I would ever attend a Wikimania now even if they held another one in my back yard (the greater Boston area is within commuting distance for me). --Pi zero (talk) 15:50, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: In my judgment, corruption grows to consume the available money. And "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants," according to former Justice Brandeis.

Research cited in my proposal for a "Birds of a Feather" session on this at Wikimania 2017 indicates that politicians tend to be most responsive when the service area of a leading news source matches the politicians' jurisdiction.

I think there is an opportunity to build such a web platform that could develop the following that Google and Wikipedia have today.

I think Wikinews could be that platform if we could get the organizational politics aligned.

I'd be pleased to have your reactions to my Wikimania session proposal and the material I've posted under v:Category:Freedom and abundance, especially v:Winning the War on Terror -- even if you do not attend.

'I could also use your help in getting input from other key people in Wikinews. Moreover, if the conference room has a reasonable Internet connection, we could open that session to virtual attendees.' I have a small Webex subscription for up to 8 participants. With that, I should be able to allow you to attend virtually without leaving your home.

I share your concern about GWB's police state. This conference will be in Montreal. I'm not sure, but you may not need a passport to go there from Boston -- though you would need, e.g., a MA driver's license.

DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:38, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Shared Public StarBucks IP

Hey, Heads up just wanted to say > 184.149.39.108 is a shared IP address - Starbucks / Dufferin and Steeles.

Regards, iDM

I do not see what is the problem with that.
acagastya 20:27, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Possible Troll and impersonating Wikipedia editors. (user:Oshwah) specially. Just giving you heads up that its a public IP.

Possible. But not necessarily. Couple of years ago, a shared IP wrote 20+ articles, writing one OR as well. Not all IPs are vandals.
acagastya 20:59, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Category for "Supreme Court of India and "Indian Supreme Court hearings"

I think there are enough articles to populate those categories. So, shall we add this in the to-do list?
acagastya 10:08, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Pi zero cited on the Spanish-language Wikinews "Water cooler"

@Pi zero: I recently mentioned your comments about Serbian Wikinews and Voice of America in the Spanish-language Wikinews: I found some comments to the effect that some of their contributors were lifting articles straight from VoA. I paraphrased your comments, suggesting they may want to be careful about doing that. DavidMCEddy (talk) 21:36, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: Interesting. (Btw, it looks like you've got a typo there; you had [[Usarior:Pi zero]], which is a redlink, rather than [[Usario:Pi zero]].) --Pi zero (talk) 22:01, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Excuse me: It was "Usuario:Pi zero", which is a page for you on that Wiki, which you've never created. I just changed it to [[:en:User:Pi zero|Usuarior:Pi zero]], so it comes to your en.wikinews page.

@DavidMCEddy: Heh. We both made typos. You had an extra "r", and above I missed a "u"; the word we were both trying for is "Usuario". It's perfectly reasonable to link to my English Wikinews page; I did create my user page there, about four years ago, but it's a soft redirect to my English Wikinews page. es:Usuario:Pi zero. --Pi zero (talk) 00:16, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Translated quote

By "breaking", do you mean the template is not working properly for some languages or it breaks the link with translated quote template?
acagastya 08:21, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I mean, the template did not do what it was supposed to do do. There are two differences between the templates: the parameters are in a different order, and the {{translated quote}} template adds quotation marks that the {{translation note}} template does not. --Pi zero (talk) 10:41, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I know the order is different, and I tackled that problem. For double quotes, you could have tweaked the template.
acagastya 17:42, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I could have. I admit, I was in a hurry, and the easiest way to fix the problem was simply to restore the older version. That said, I still don't really understand why you want the two coded independently. Defining {{translated quote}} in terms of {{translation note}} seems like the simplest solution to me. What am I missing? --Pi zero (talk) 17:50, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

For languages like Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew, the direction should be rtl. the simplest way to add it was to remove the dependency of the other template. (the language name was not showing when I tried)
acagastya 18:13, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: You mean, process the additional parameter locally rather than pass it through to the other template? (If that's it, there's another way to do that...) --Pi zero (talk) 18:20, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: I tried something different with the template. Does it solve the problem you were observing? --Pi zero (talk) 18:41, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Nuke

1. Special:Nuke/Melvin_cookson
2. Special:Nuke/113.53.228.87
3. Special:Nuke/Nandy priscilaa
4. Special:Nuke/Andhi_aayie

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Acagastya (talk • contribs) 09:01, 1 June 2017

Undo of the Sri Lanka article

I am really sorry for that edit. I wanted to see what were the issues I wanted to highlight in the review comments, and by mistake, I "saved" that revision. (I didn't check that revision, thankfully!) I should be careful. I am sorry.
acagastya 08:53, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Templates like {{Future problem}} and {{DFS problem}}

Remember when I used italics in the KELT-9b article so that I do not forget to distance from source (link), or this sentence "May will meet with Queen Elizabeth II..." which should be in accordance with WN:Future. I was wondering if we should have templates like {{Future problem}} and {{DFS problem}}? I was about to create subpage in my userspace, but then I thought to ask you so that other reviewers can understand the colour code as well.

Like:

Distance from source/foo bar 2000 WN:Future/lorem ipsum sit dolor amet
acagastya 05:26, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

As I think I've mentioned, I do that stuff in a separate buffer, where I use WN:BB. In addition to not ever wanting to risk accidentally publishing something with temporary stuff still in it , color coding is an eccentric choice by individuals. I don't even use the same colors to mean the same things every time; and then, some people are color blind which totally changes what colors would work for them and also what colors they might prefer. --Pi zero (talk) 12:27, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

FIFA Confederation Cup

June 17 - July 2. Sixteen matches. Ten days. What do you think? Just like the last year's Euro 16 (but with less number of matches)?
acagastya 06:06, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

I will be leaving for Mysore tomorrow, but I will be writing about French Open.
acagastya 06:07, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

No problems

No problems about the revert. Thanks for the information. Sagecandor (talk) 19:23, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

@Sagecandor: Sister links are okay to add later, and that one is a good thought, much appreciated. (There's no automatic Category: prefix for commons links, so I added that.) --Pi zero (talk) 19:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Please...

Don´t forget to review The Petya computer virus attacks companies around the world, I know there are very few reviewers here but it´ll be a pity that this news would not be published. Regards!! Esteban (talk) 18:11, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

@Ezarate: I will do my best. Please understand, though, I got about 90 minutes of sleep last night; I'm not in very good shape atm. --Pi zero (talk) 18:22, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I know, this wiki needs more reviewers, thanks for your work Esteban (talk) 18:24, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

ArbCom

I would like to nominate you for this year's ArbCom.
acagastya 07:31, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

I am willing to accept nomination. --Pi zero (talk) 14:14, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Federer wins eighth Wimbledon title

The broadcast report for the article (36' 25' 40') was posted on #wikinews-en channel. I can't wikilink, sorry. Match Stats might need JS enabled.
acagastya 18:22, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Wrong title

Today I saw the news titled Astronomers discover smallest known star. I think this is the wrong title, as you can read about w:White dwarfs: "The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years." And about Sirius B: "This mass is packed into a volume roughly equal to the Earth's." But the source here says below the first picture: "The newly discovered tiny star, in orange, is slightly larger than Saturn,..." So it is much larger than Earth and larger than Sirius B ! Fmrauch (talk) 00:36, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

@Numbermaniac: Thoughts? (It will likely be a while before I can apply myself to this question.) --Pi zero (talk) 01:02, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

White Dwarf is formed when a star is out of fuel. A remnant of a star — that reminds me of the heap paradox. A star is a cell which converts hydrogen into helium. White dwarf is just a phase and it can not undergo nuclear fusion. According to NASA star is just a ball of gas which emits light and heat but in this article we are dealing with those heavenly bodies which can convert hydrogen to helium.
acagastya 07:18, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Looks like acagastya's answered it for me. White dwarfs can't convert hydrogen to helium - so they don't quite fit under the definition of stars used in this sense. (On a side note, I'm not sure why I wasn't notified for that mention...) -- numbermaniac 11:36, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

@Numbermaniac: must be because there was a typo while pinging you.
acagastya 11:46, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

That's probably it, yeah. Apparently correcting the typo somehow didn't meet the software's criteria for pinging. --Pi zero (talk) 11:54, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

finished

Due to my traumatic experiences of your repeated vandalism and harassment to my Wikinews account, I have no interest in contributing to Wikinews now or any time in the future. I have placed redirects on my old Wikimedia Wikinews accounts to go to user talk:Nicole Sharp. I beg of you to please just leave them as they are, and let the matter be. Soft redirects and duplicate talkpages for old useraccounts show up in search-engine results, leading to confusing and conflicting results. The only account with any content at all should be user:Nicole Sharp. If you feel it is necessary, then please just delete the old userpages and their talkpages instead of soft-redirecting them, so that there is no duplicate content being indexed. Barring any further vandalism to my unused old userpages, this here is my last edit to Wikinews. If you need to message me, please contact me through meta:user talk:Nicole Sharp. 72.28.201.163 (talk) 06:03, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Note: The above block evasion describes a stance and large-scale action typical of what they were blocked for in the first place. I've left it in place as a record of their misbehavior. I'm not inclined to apply a very long block to the IP unless it proves necessary, as collateral damage seems possible with an IP (at least in principle) and the blocked user's harassment of the project has extended over years so that applying a block longer than the time-scale of abuse is impractical. --Pi zero (talk) 11:49, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Publisher withdraws book about Nelson Mandela's final days after family complaint

Hi,

Thank you for your comments and review of the above article. I have noted the comments and will work on improvements for future articles. First one in over a year so a little rusty.

Thanks again, Chandlerjoeyross (talk) 23:02, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Everyone's favorite news

I've posted a modest revision of my ideas for Everyone's favorite news to Wikiversity. I tried to respond to your concerns in the notes if not otherwise, but I suspect that you may consider the said responses inadequate. I'd be happy to entertain further comments, suggestions for revisions, etc.

I'm especially interested in developing a methodology for collecting and analyzing data on audience and various indices of editorial policies that might be different in different language versions of Wikinews and how we can use that to better understand and improve Wikinews.

If I may, I wish to ask more about two of your comments:

• You wrote, "AGF absolutely does not belong on a news site." I'm not sure what you mean by this: I agree that material should not be published as news without rigorous documentation of sources. To me, AGF does not mean accepting someone's claims without documentation. It means responding professionally and respectfully to others. AGF does not prevent me from privately believing that another editor is likely a criminal scumbag, either stupid or paid to distort reality or disrupt the honest work of others. Rather, it pushes me to stay focused on the task at hand and the Wikimania rules -- and my responses should be civil and courteous but firm in insisting that the documentation the other editor(s) provided so far are not sufficiently credible to support the language they used. That's what "assuming good faith" means to me. Formalities dictated by the AGF policy say nothing about what I really believe, and that doesn't matter, anyway: What matters is responding in a way that minimizes the chances of a flame war and maximizes the chances of positive, constructive work. Does that make sense?

• You wrote that ”Blogs have no value journalistically": I have several thoughts in suggesting "Wikiblogs" -- and I'm open to other names:

First, I want to keep as many people as possible in the Wikimedia system, where they can be engaged constructively rather than lose them to a Balkanized space where they will ventilate to like-minded people, amplifying the level of misunderstanding that drives conflict. We will not retain the true believers, ideologues, and paid shills: They'd rather be victimized than question their own beliefs. We may be able to help those people indirectly if we can retain some of their family, friends and neighbors, who are more willing to listen to contrary views and can later provide counterpoints to some of the worst xenophobic comments. This is part of the justification behind Wikiblogs and Wikisocial: Reduce the exploitation and Balkanization of the international body politic by offering a space for more constructive exchange of ideas and concerns.

Second, people who contribute to Wikiblogs and Wikisocial will learn more about what it means to write from a neutral point of view, citing credible sources, and treating others with respect (even when they seem not to deserve it) -- what I call AGF, as I just noted above. If they do that, they are more likely later to contribute something useful to Wikinews -- and more likely to moderate rather than amplify conflict in what they do away from the Wikimedia system.

Third, the more people we can retain within the Wikimedia system, the more they are likely to read Wikinews, Wikipedia, etc., and promote them to others. This could help moderate conflict and improve the quality of understanding and the prospects for conflict resolution and broadly shared economic growth.

What do you think? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 08:28, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: I have been meaning, each day for the past several days, to buckle down and write a semi-essay to you about my understanding of what Wikinews is. Each day I get up determined to get a huge amount done, including this, and go to bed frustrated. Today, I mean to get a huge amount done and buckle down and write it.

I used to have a short-list of three flaws of AGF (I honesty forget whether I've rattled off this list for you).

1. If AGF is taken at its word, it instructs people to assume something. One naturally takes it that way, because its mnemonic form explicitly references such an instruction, even if in theory one has read words that say something a bit different. Telling would-be information-providers that they should assume something is a terrible idea!
2. After I'd been around for a year or two I discovered WP:ZEN, which says (and I appreciated the style of the page, reminiscent of Discordianism and hacker koans), "You should always assume good faith, even when you don't." That was my first explicitly alert to the fact AGF doesn't mean what it says. Although I recognized at the time that it was true, it was another year or so before I felt comfortable that I truly understood it. But I've now had many additional years to think about this, and one of the things I think is: showing would-be information providers, by example, that they should say something different from what they mean is a terrible idea!
3. When AGF is treated as an enforceable principle of conduct, over time a class of bad-faith users learn to use it as a weapon: first defensive, fending off attacks by requiring others to AGF, then offensive, getting their victims into trouble when they succeed in provoking them. Creating a horribly toxic social atmosphere.

I spent a very long time meditating on AGF during-and-after the nasty events on Wikinews in 2010; the above short-list was one eventual outcome; another was a conclusion that what happened here was due to two problems — powder-keg tension between fundamentally opposed factions on Wikinews, and lack of an explicit alternative principle to serve the social function vacated by the absence AGF. We have since articulated the alternative that was, afaics, always implicit behind the rejection of AGF on Wikinews: never assume.

I'm mentioning all this AGF stuff now because it really seems mostly separately from the points I wanted to make in that semi-essay about what Wikinews is. One thing I do imagine including in the semi-essay is some discussion of neutrality. It's quite important to realize that as a procedural matter, neutrality on Wikinews is profoundly different from neutrality on Wikipedia: there isn't a wikimedian notion of neutrality, it really means something different at en.wn than at en.wp, and this creates an extra front in the culture clash between the two projects. --Pi zero (talk)

Thanks for this. I agree that we should not use misleading language, and AGF is misleading, as you say.

And I like Wikinews:Never assume, as a stronger version of w:Wikipedia:Citing sources.

Still, I think that the need to treat others with respect should be stated clearly and not buried almost as an afterthought in a discussion of "Wikinews:Never assume".

Also, regarding neutrality: Is it fair to say that en.wn applies a stronger concept of the term en.wp? DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:42, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: I'm leery of etiquette guidelines, generally. I don't necessarily reject all such, but after watching the way they have gone horribly awry on en.wp, I am very cautious.

Weirdly, our neutrality principles on Wikinews are different from Wikipedia's, neither stronger nor weaker. It is, I think, quite possible for a Featured Article on either en.wn or en.wp to fail the other project's criteria for neutrality. What's going on there is something very deep; a careful study of the two approaches to neutrality would, I think, reveal that each project is using an approach that cannot work for the other project. --Pi zero (talk) 13:13, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Prince Philip makes last solo public engagement

Hi Pi zero, Thank you for your for reviewing the above mentioned article. Appreciate it. I have taken notes of the comments for future articles. Thanks again.CASSIOPEIA (talk) 22:23, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

FYI

No need to be so patient with the pirates. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 06:10, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

@Zhuyifei1999: Although I am aware that, on occasion, I have gotten into trouble because I was too patient, and it does create a certain amount of extra work for me (which is itself a kind of getting-into-trouble), I am inclined to treat patience and grace as important in dealing with all newcomers. I don't ever want en.wn to become the sort of unfriendly place for newcomers that I see en.wp has become. Patience with newcomers is very difficult and I don't always achieve it as well as I would aspire to; but, over the years, I count among my successes several people who have gone on to become highly successful Wikinewsies. As it says on our WN:Never assume page (analogous to Assume Good Faith on many other projects), "Treat people as well as circumstances allow, even when (as will sometimes, sadly, happen) it becomes necessary to escort them to the exit." --Pi zero (talk) 13:32, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Things to do in Denver

Hi Pi. Thanks a lot for keeping an eye on my talk page as well as non-newsworthy item, Favonian. Would you consider semi-protecting the former and create-protecting the latter? I'm not a regular at Wikinews and my username is an unlikely (if only because of its length) name for a news item. Incidentally, the perennial pest has is immortalized on w:User:Bri/Denver LTA. Best regards, Favonian (talk) 16:45, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

I've semi-protected both page names against creation. Seems a reasonable request under the circumstances, although in generic cases I tend to leave common vandalism page names un-create-protected, on the theory that it's easier to connect troublemakers over time if they're allowed to identify themself by recreating the same page over and over. --Pi zero (talk) 17:29, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Ah yes, the old honey pot. Thanks a bundle! Over at my natural habitat, the range 66.87.150.0/23 is enjoying a lengthy furlough. Just saying, in case he decides to diversify his portfolio of targets. Favonian (talk) 17:42, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

What Wikinews is

@DavidMCEddy: I'm putting this in a separate section, hoping to make things easier to keep sorted.

You've been coming across very enthusiastic about — if I've rightly caught the spirit of what you've been saying — a vision of Wikinews serving the need for local coummunity news coverage across the globe. I'm familiar with, and in agreement with, the idea that uncensored neutral-and-accurate community news coverage is vitally important to a democratic society, at any scale from a village to a continent-spanning nation (and beyond, to the global community). And enthusiasm is great to see. However, all that said, there is also another side to my feelings about your proposals. I believe we have achieved something here on en.wn that is unique in the world, and of truly immense import, that needs to be protected, nurtured, and grown into something that might just be part of the cure for some really major problems with the world as it is evolving in the internet age. These visions, yours and mine, can be brought to harmonious coexistence, I think — but if your vision were pursued in a way that interfered with mine, I would oppose it with my last breath, exactly because of what I see in my vision. So it's really, really important, from where I'm sitting, to try to explain my vision to you, so that we can then look for ways to harmonize, and your enthusiasm and mine can aid each other instead of fighting each other.

Okay, enough of the prefatory remarks.

Wikinews, as I understand it, is at the intersection of two major forms of information providing: journalism, and wikis. It's taken me years on en.wn to reach my current understanding of these two forms; practitioners of each of the two forms often have very limited (if not outright wrong) understanding of the other form (to say nothing of practitioners who don't understand their own form :-). The goals of each of these two forms are often seen, by practitioners of either form, as incompatible, so that the intersection of the two forms would be empty; hence I see tremendous significance, and tremendous potential, in the place en.wn is occupying within that intersection. I'll try to explain aspects of this situation one-at-a-time.

• Journalism. A few years ago I recall watching a panel discussion on some university-run satellite TV feed (some university in the western part of the US, I think; could have been Arizona, Utah, Oregon...) in which they'd brought together three particularly noted young up-and-coming journalists to talk about the future of journalism. So-called "millennials", I think, though I don't recall whether the organizers used that term. And they all said more-or-less the same thing: there's vast amounts of information out there, the challenge is rapidly matching up information with the reliability of the journalist. I would add (not remembering exactly how it was said in the panel discussion, of course), the deserved reputation of the journalist. A journalist's reputation needs to be based on their proven dedication to reporting objective reality, not on, say, their dedication to bolstering some political position (although some people consider the idea of reporting objective reality to be a political position; "reality has a well-known liberal bias", as Stephen Colbert put it). The point of the exercise is not getting unvetted information out the door quickly, but matching it up with the journalist's deserved reputation for dedication to getting the story right — and then, given that one is matching up information with deserved reputation, doing so as promptly as one can. I recall a piece not long ago (not sure if it was on public television, or some cable news channel) with recollections of how Walter Cronkite handled real-time coverage of events on the day JFK was shot; should they report some particular point that they had only one source for, and in the specific case Cronkite's decision was that they would attribute it, reporting that it had been asserted by so-and-so.

• Wikis. Wikinews and Wikipedia are about as different as it is possible for two wikimedian sisters to be. Over time I admit I've gotten quite weary of anti-Wikinews rhetoric based ultimately on conflating wiki-ness with close adherence to Wikipedian principles; and, seeking to make sense of it all, I've (frankly) rethought the notion of wiki-ness from the ground up, based on my understanding of volunteers' perspective (rather than, say, assertions by Jimmy Wales or the Foundation).

  The essential principle of the wikimedian wikis is, I submit, that The People — the general citizenry of the internet, anyway — should have a voice in information providing, specifically in providing reality-based information. I remember what the internet was like in the mid-to-late 1990s, from the start of the World Wide Web; at first, there was a wide mix of web sites, some of which were really cool — but as time went on it became clear that the coolest sites tended to disappear after at most four years (because they were university student pages that went away when the students graduated), and even as the internet became more and more mainstream, its content was more and more controlled by special interests — corporations, governments, religious organizations. It was really looking as if internet content in the future would be of just two kinds — propaganda, and paywalled — and knowledge was going to become a privilege of the rich. Then Wikipedia came along, and has (so far) prevented that particular sort of dystopia from happening — but Wikipedia has its own new sorts of problems.

  (All of this, btw, can be seen in the context of the entire history of human civilization. It took thousands of years for the ideosphere to evolve a memetic ecosystem that would bring about high technology and, ultimately, the internet; but the recent, especially successful part of that evolution is based on the dynamics of memetic replication in the human ideosphere of the print age — and the internet apparently changes the dynamics of memetic replication, more radically than the printing press did, destabilizing the whole memetic ecosystem. So that, along with all our other global problems in the world today, we're also struggling to make human society work in the internet medium — with far more similarities to historical human societies than some of the internet generation want to admit, but also subtly profound differences that are hard to recognize, let alone come to grips with.)

  Wikipedia aspires to be a traditional encyclopedia, and that in itself creates big problems with neutrality (a topic of surpassing complexity/subtlety). Wikipedia tries to treat everyone as equal, and that creates big problems with trust/reputation (recall how central deserved reputation is to the whole concept of journalism). And both of these things contribute to a big problem with the reader's attitude toward sourcing.

  The basic procedure for developing content on Wikipedia is, create an article and let anyone on the whole Internet edit it. Apply unbounded time, and let the community thrash out how to evolve the article. That's it; the whole thing. One procedure, meant to do everything. The theory is that eventually, given an unbounded number of people editing the article over an unbounded period of time, the quality of the article will statistically rise to some fairly high level, though always with a bit of fluctation. Neutrality is a matter of unbounded squabbling over which things to mention and how much weight to give to them, which tends (btw) to create an unfortunate perception that it's not possible for one person to be neutral (which naturally raises the question, why bother trying). Even Wikipedia isn't really able to treat everyone equally — admins are more trusted, and many users get booted out as vandals or other varieties of undesirables — but its efforts to approximate that sort of radical egalitarianism translate into basically not trusting anyone much. Even admins, who are handed a big pile of privs, are mostly enabled to do things that can be readily undone. You'd have to go somewhere above the level of admin to find someone on Wikipedia afforded trust with anything like the flavor of the review priv on en.wn.

  As for sourcing. A traditional encyclopedia summarizes. Looking at the print Britannica I grew up with, every article bears initials identifying its author, so each article invokes the reputation of its particular author (if a sophisticated reader knows to look them up), and the whole encyclopedia invokes the reputation of its editorial board who selected the authors of its articles (just as a newspaper ultimately invokes the reputation of its management, which is why it was such a big deal a few years ago when NYT found they had hired a reporter who had faked a whole bunch of interviews). But mostly we would just look up stuff in our Britannica and not think much about the particular person who wrote it, just the reputation of Britannica. What about Wikipedia? Because it's a summary, it can be difficult or impossible to point to one thing to justify some of what is said; indeed, what's behind the text you look at may be several years of arguing back and forth on the article's talk page. What the article may provide is footnotes — which, realistically, most readers will not consult. I do consult those footnotes, rather often, and very often find either that there is no footnote near what I really want to check on, or that the nearby footnote is documenting some other fact than the one I'm interested in, or that it may in fact be intended to address that fact but I'm unable to find the supposedly-documented claim in that source. Sometimes, of course, the cited source isn't even available on-line. And what all this adds up to is that Wikipedia accustoms readers to mostly not asking where the information comes from. From time to time on the wikimedia-l mailing list I see people crowing proudly that someone has said something about how much they trust Wikipedia, and I think, you shouldn't be proud of that; it represents a failure of Wikipedia. Encouraging people to not think about where information came from is unhealthy for the individual reader, and unhealthy for society as a whole.

• Wikinews. A news article is (when written) about something that just happened. (A vital part of Wikinews's mission is also to provide a permanent un-paywalled archive of its articles, but that's an archive of the state in which they were published when the news was fresh.) It follows that anything that depends on unbounded time will utterly fail. And unbounded time is Wikipedia's one formula for everything. So the Wikipedian way of doing things fails across the board. Everything about Wikinews is tuned, in large or small ways, to allow it to deliver the journalistic matching of information with deserved reputation, and do it within a news timeframe — which requires, on one hand, tuning the whole social structure of the project for treating users as individual people with individual accumulated reputations, for good or ill (WN:Never assume mentions accumulated reputation, just as you've remarked it mentions politeness; I don't know that I could fully describe everything about en.wn that plays up reputation, though, it's just too pervasive); and on the other hand, tuning all the specific policies applying to articles so that the production of a news article doesn't require any adversarial techniques. For example, the whole concept of neutrality on Wikipedia is determined adversarially, whereas on Wikinews neutrality has to be something that any individual Wikinewsie can do quickly and reliably, even on a subject they have strong opinions about (if they're unable to achieve Wikinews neutrality, they are expected to disqualify themselves, and of course there's the review procedure to guarantee a second, independent experienced Wikinewsie thoroughly reviews each article before publication, which will hopefully catch any lapses of judgement before they get out the door). Wikinews review works best when the reporter and reviewer are both highly experienced Wikinewsies, both trying to make the article live up to the project's highest standards, the reviewer catching most (or, just conceivably, all) of the flaws in the reporter's submission. And as for thinking about where information came from — besides our review process, which allows us to have a reputation to care about — we're really quite in-your-face about it, constantly reminding the reader to think about where information came from, by explicitly specifying attribution: the difference between "the fire started in a third-floor apartment" and "fire officials said the fire started in a third-floor apartment" is not just that Wikinews is still right even if the fire is later discovered to have started somewhere else, but also that the reader is reminded to think about where the third-floor-apartment claim comes from.

Wikipedians are often too emotionally committed to the Wikiepdian way of doing things to admit that a wiki can do these things, since a Wikipedia-style wiki clearly can't. Journalists are often deeply skeptical, or outright dismissive, of anything called "citizen journalism". And here sits en.wn, doing what wikis aren't supposed to be able to do (or, bringing journalism to the wiki realm where it isn't supposed to be able to go). --Pi zero (talk) 01:55, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

I think this goes somewhere........

Pi zero (7), Willian S. Saturn (6), Brian (5), RockerballAustralia (5), ShakataGaNai (5), Mikemoral (5)....is the count on ArbComm (one person only got 4 votes).....so, should I put an 'announcement' somewhere?? --Bddpaux (talk) 19:09, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Gryllida has confirmed the results too, on xyr user talk. I'm honestly too far gone tonight to work out where to go from here; it's possible that citable confirmation from both election committee members will suffice. I should check what we did last year... --Pi zero (talk) 02:06, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Not that I'll cry if I can't.......

.....but as an Admin, can I block vandals??--Bddpaux (talk) 19:10, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

@Bddpaux: If I recall correctly, yes you can.
103.254.128.118 (talk) 19:41, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

@Bddpaux: Yes. Wikinews has what I have often characterized as the most sane blocking policy in the wikimedia sisterhood. The first two sentences say that sometimes it's necessary to impose blocks, that admins should use their good judgement about when and for how long to block, and that everything else on the policy page (about six screens worth, on my laptop) is just advice. --Pi zero (talk) 20:22, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Editprotected queue

The Template:Editprotected queue is getting pretty deep (with items going back to 2015). Is there any chance you could work on it? You are the volunteer (listed at Template:Editprotected/Volunteers) with what I found to be the most recent activity (based on talk page responses). I was trying to fix things from Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags. Thank you. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 15:04, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Iirc there was a glut on that queue that took place around that time, and clearly it became a problem. Perhaps I can whittle at it a bit later today; first priority when possible, of course, is the review queue (that being the nature of news). --Pi zero (talk) 15:16, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

It sounds like WN needs an administrator that is not focused on reviews (thus allowing others to do reviews unimpeded). Thanks 50.53.1.33 (talk) 15:21, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

WN needs to grow, period. I'm not just focused on reviews, and processing editprotected requests is arguably pretty similar to review anyway; but the reviews are almost always the most urgent thing. In the long term I'm also the user who's developing the tools meant to make all these tasks easier (essay). --Pi zero (talk) 15:28, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

You seem to have some interesting ideas. It seems like it would take a while to study up on the things you are undertaking. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 16:18, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

BTW, I know you didn't remove the protection on Template:Past events but all of the rest of Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags are also protected and look like old news items from the 2007 Rugby World Cup. I would fix the markup issues if I could. It seems like a pain to create Template:Editprotected requests for each (especially since that likely will not be looked at unless someone specifically asks via another channel). This also goes for other corrections to published and archived articles (e.g., changes needed to fix magic links which are going away, etc.). Is there a better way than making piles of edit protected requests? Thank you. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 18:13, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Deletion of Discovery Communication wins bid to buy Scripps Networks

I just edited it to add an image (File:Discovery Scripps Networks Interactive.JPG) to this article, Discovery Communication wins bid to buy Scripps Networks, just with in an hour and half. I found additional sourced for information to expand the article, which when editing turned up that the article was deleted. Less than an hour and half is NOT two days for/per WN:ABANDON. Also, the these deals given anti-trust approval are not automatic a done deal and the story still is open. Approval is not expected until early 2018 in this case. If you don't understand this don't touch business acquisition articles. --Spshu (talk) 18:12, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

@Spshu: If I misjudged the state of the article, I certainly apologize. We get a very great deal of advertising/spam, and the addition of a non-free logo sort of image to an article about something that happened over two weeks ago looked pretty suspicious. I'll restore it when I finish writing this note. Keep in mind, you would need a new focal event to refresh the article; expanding it would not (by itself) help to make it publishable. --Pi zero (talk) 19:02, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

RVV

Please revert this: Special:Diff/4332942. Thank you. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 06:30, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Got it, and several other examples of de facto vandalism by the same bot at the same time. Good catch; thanks. --Pi zero (talk) 06:36, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

White House IP poster

I do not want to dismiss your or anyone's real concerns about "White House" or the American voice on Wikinews, but I think the IP is just trying to start a fight. I could have bought that a legitimate poster 1) misunderstood "it's no insult" OR 2) called @Gryllida:'s suggestions ridiculous OR 3) repeatedly declined to offer a title draft when asked but not all three. Like I said, I really don't mind if anyone changes the headline to a better one, better in ANY way for any reason. You two want to continue the discussion somewhere else? Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:10, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: No, I don't. I spectacularly don't have time, and only intended to offer a couple of related factual observations of possible interest/use. I agree there could be identity questions; I expect there are very many people on the same IP, potentially of wildly varying intent. --Pi zero (talk) 19:23, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Seriously? Looking at the way I have been editing, it should be easy to guess who I am. Why should I suggest the title? When would you learn? I would say that you are starting a fight when you deflected the whole point of "sounding unnatural while explaining a fact" as Gryllida's comment being ridiculous. I did not mean it, nor did I say it. It was you, who did that. Your ignorance to acknowledge the fact that the headline is not clear what it is about, and lack of interest to improve, though you have written so many articles, makes me worry. It could be a different thing that you really don't know how to reword the lede so most of the audience can understand, but it were to be, you would have mentioned that, did you?
103.254.128.118 (talk) 01:30, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

The only aggressor in this discussion has been an anonymous IP. If you do not intend to troll, rethink your behavior. (Same if you do.) --Pi zero (talk) 02:02, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

How about rethinking for headline? Given they have written 50+ articles, is it my responsibility to fix it. If my article had to be renamed after it was published, I would excersise caution whenever I had to write a headline. For the part, you can do better than that, it is more of a disappointment and frustration rather than a troll.
103.254.128.118 (talk) 02:11, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

You're saying you did not intend to troll. When one is feeling frustrated, it is quite possible to come across trollishly without intending to; phrasing things well can be remarkably tricky. I agree that Darkfrog24 should work on the international-audience aspect, but I think that message might have been successfully conveyed more amicably. --Pi zero (talk) 02:24, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
if you agree, then say so. The incidents where Darkfrog24 has shown signs of ignorance to improve on their weak points is increasing. Though everyone's learning curve is different, but after writing 50 articles, one expects editors to follow the pillars. (That reminds me how you had responded when Darkfrog24 used the word terrorists in headline. What about that?)
103.254.128.118 (talk) 02:34, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

I've made no secret of my belief that Darkfrog24 needs to reach a deeper level of grokking Wikinews principles before they'll be ready for the review bit, and I've been concerned for some time that they may have stagnated (perhaps through not perceiving the further goal). There's a discussion with them on these themes I've been meaning to get back to, that I'd postponed to concentrate on review. (And my first non-review priority is the bug fix for AlvaroMolina; how priorities do pile up.) --Pi zero (talk) 03:08, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Not you or me, but Darkfrog24 has to think about that, and learn from the observation and experience.
103.254.128.118 (talk) 03:26, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

That's true enough. It's also true, though, that how receptive one is to learning from an experience depends on how one thinks about the subject when coming to it, which can be discussed. --Pi zero (talk) 11:13, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Re-review New South Wales police extradict 'self-healer' Hongchi Xiao from London over death of six-year-old boy at conference

I made some changes. PokestarFan (talk) 21:35, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

@PokestarFan: The date on a published article is the date of publication. Also, if you wish to submit a change to a published article, like for example fixing a typo, just making the edit brings it to the attention of reviewers who will examine it to determine whether or not to publish the change. --Pi zero (talk) 21:42, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Ethics

"trying to subvert" "sneaking" "behavior" "cheating"

This isn't appropriate. If I had been trying to cheat, sneak or trick anyone, I wouldn't have drawn the matter to the review team's attention. I was completely up-front, made my case in the open, and you acknowledged the post in which I did so in your review assessment. I did absolutely nothing underhanded or unethical, and it is not right for you to speak to or about me this way. You don't agree with me about how to interpret the freshness rule, and you're withholding your approval from an article of which you do not approve. You have every right to do both those things. What you must not do is call my actions cheating, sneaking, "behavior" or subversion. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:43, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I saw your comment on the article page, and had meant to get back to you on it more promptly. On one hand I certainly didn't mean those remarks in the way you've taken then; on the other hand there is a criticism I'm trying to make, while I'm clearly not doing well at it. I'll try again (quite possibly failing again; but I really would rather try and fail than not try).

You did nothing intentionally underhanded; I concur. It's true, though, that you have repeatedly submitted articles like this, and that's not an appropriate way to approach the issue. There's a difficulty of terminology in this situation, in that you aren't deliberately doing something inappropriate, but your actions are attempting to erode project policy. At the heart of this, it appears to me, is a disconnect that I don't know how to address, in which you're missing the deep structure of the project. I consider you a real asset to the project; but that doesn't mean you've fully grokked things, nor that you're ready for reviewer. When you say that I have every right to withhold my approval of an article of which I do not approve, I feel a sense of unease; it's sort-of true, but makes it sound as if I get to make up the rules because I'm a reviewer. Not so. There's a range, at one end of which are the core rules that are not arbitrary but form a coherent whole and that, as a reviewer, I'm expected to enforce without imposing my personal opinions on them. The very deepest of those I wouldn't try to change, a bit further along are some things that I would certainly feel the need to get a major community consensus before tampering with, further along the range would be some things I'd want to consult carefully about, before tinkering, with other veteran Wikinewsies, and so on until one gets to things that are personal preferences I'd try to apply as far as reasonably possible. The reason this arrangement should remain stable over time is because the core rules are, to some degree, a Platonic structure, with some degree of identity independent of the opinions of particular users. When someone is learning the ropes, they need to grasp the core rules as a Platonic structure, and the theory is that once they've reached that level, if they're honest (of course, but I've never thought that was remotely at issue in your case — I'm inclined to think you're one of the most honest people I know) and also show aptitude for implementing those rules, it's safe to given them the reviewer bit and trust they'll continue to grow. You had objected, a while back, when you felt I'd treated you as if I were a teacher and you a student; well, that sort of teacher-student relationship is likely to change qualitatively once the erstwhile student groks the core rules. Unfortunately, in your case, for whatever reason, I perceive you've stopped short of acquiring the Platonic structure of the core rules. Possibly you've been sidetracked by some other set of rules (perhaps partly Wikipedian?) that aren't as core to Wikinews as you've thought, or perhaps something else is going on. But for whatever reason, it looks to me, you're not ready for reviewer and I'm not convinced you're continuing to get closer to ready for it; and this issue to do with freshness seems of a piece with that. --Pi zero (talk) 02:59, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

I certainly didn't mean those remarks in the way you've taken then

Then I am satisfied.

Everything else is another discussion. We can have it whenever you're ready. I just don't want to mix it with this other one. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:12, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Reverted edit

Please elaborate on your reasoning for reverting my edit [1]. In what sense is making the formatting consistent within the article destroying information? --Someoneinmyheadbutit'snotme (talk) 03:16, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

The article uses "logical" quotation (I don't much care what you call it, the important thing is how it works): putting the final punctuation inside the quotation marks indicates the punctuation applies to what was said, while putting the punctuation outside the quotation marks makes no claim about punctuation of what was said. An article written consistently that way may have some final punctuation marks inside the quotation marks and others outside; it's not inconsistent formatting, it's simply conveying information about which punctuation applies to what was said versus which punctuation only applies to the article in which the quotation is embedded. --Pi zero (talk) 03:48, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

links

If it is perfectly okay to have external links without source template, (and thus, not mentioning which website would open), let me have links on my userpage. If one can have links to blog, let me have the links that I prefer. (See: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User_talk:Darkfrog24#You_might_have_noticed...)
27.59.51.126 (talk) 04:21, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

For any third parties observing, the links in question are evil — malware/browser-hacking kind of stuff. I really had thought much better of the user, or I'd have noticed sooner (rather than having to have it pointed out to me). --Pi zero (talk) 04:28, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

The reason I have added is because you supported Darkfrog24 about not using {{source}}. There are multiple benefits of using the template -- maintaining uniformity, and informing where the users would be redirected to, to name a few. I can bring up pointless questions like "How do you claim it is a malware?", but let's skip that part and discuss what is permitted on the user page. (Note: if you say we mention Wikinews is not responsible for the links to external website, Wikinews is not responsible for the malware links I have on my user page.)
acagastya PING ME! 04:34, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't even matter that you're apparently acting on a misinterpretation of what I wrote. Even if I had taken the position you seem to think I did, responding by blatantly violating WN:POINT would still be inappropriate as well as unacceptable. No, you aren't free to do harm just because you're doing it from your user page. --Pi zero (talk) 04:54, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Can you prove it was disruptive? Tell me, which policy did I violate to call for WN:point?
27.59.19.27 (talk) 05:07, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

I am not going to edit my user page, just to let you know. But if you do not explain properly, I need ArbCom to hear this, even if they rule against me.
27.59.19.27 (talk) 05:09, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

If you are who you claim to be, you're block-evading. --Pi zero (talk) 05:40, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Where is AIV on this site?

I want to be able to report spammers and vandals. Quinton Feldberg (talk) 03:36, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

AIV isn't a three-letter-initialism I know. We have WN:AAA. A likely place to draw attention to an immediate vandal situation is irc:wikinews-en. --Pi zero (talk) 03:39, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

More spam

Please block Jurry565 (talk · contribs) and mass delete pages. Haveperl (talk) 21:57, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Looks like you've blocked a few more accounts for the same reason. Have you considered making an edit filter? Haveperl (talk) 18:39, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

The bizarre specialized language of edit filters doesn't happen to be one of the bizarre specialized languages I know. --Pi zero (talk) 21:12, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Something to think

I don't think it is possible to generate a list of "sportsperson, who are footballers (having CAT:Football (soccer)) but not having a country category". Any plans how to deploy that?
acagastya PING ME! 05:29, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

---

And how about ex-team players? (Like Neymar and Zlatan's name in a subcategory of Barcelona titled "former Barcelona players"?
acagastya PING ME! 05:58, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Well, I suppose my not-well-thought-out impulse to add football player's native country cat could be hard to live up to. I may live to regret it, but it seemed worth noting since we rather regularly mention it in articles about them. As for how to find ones it hasn't been done with, you're quite right that there's no good way to do it. The wiki software is notably missing a transitive closure device; if it were possible to specify, when specifying a category in a DPL, "or any descendant of this category", we would in fact not need to add articles about Omaha, Nebraska to CAT:North America, nor CAT:United States, nor even CAT:Nebraska; but, no such luck. The only way to do that sort of thing that I know of is the way we do it on en.wb, where the page is added to the category for Omaha in the first place by a template, which automatically detects the ancestor categories and adds the page to special shadow categories for those ancestors. In addition to requiring all content pages to use a special template for adding to a category, it also requires the categories themselves to always use a special template that provides the first set of templates with the info they need to determine each category's parent(s). It also means that each category becomes a template transcluded in every content page belonging to any descendant of that category, so that e.g. CAT:North America would be transcluded by most of the articles in our archives. All very clumsy; I expect to hold out till we think of a better way.

Again, I don't want to make the category for a sportsperson dependent on what club they're playing for, because I don't want the categories to need updating when a player moves; it already bothers me that politician's pages tend to say "the president of Freedonia" or whatever. We're not an encyclopedia and shouldn't have any significant burden of updating categories to reflect real-world events (or, if we do have some small burden of that sort (and we already have a slightly one), I'd like to have a mechanism that will flag out for us when it needs doing — I am, of course, fundamentally opposed to having it done automatically). That's why the idea of categorizing sportspeople by native country didn't set off any alarms in my head: where they were born isn't likely to change. --Pi zero (talk) 11:44, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, okay, it's not always quite as simple as where they were born. But still, not nearly as volatile as which team they're playing for. --Pi zero (talk) 11:49, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't think I explained it properly. See this for example:

Barcelona
 └ FC Barcelona
  └ Lionel Messi
  └ Ivan Rakitic
  └ Past players of FC Barcelona
   └ Neymar
   └ Zlatan Ibrahimovic

How about that? If we have Player P's category, and ex-club E's category, then we would add it. It would only have additions, not subtractions. Let's say, P goes to A, B and C. We dp not have category for B. So, C will be his current club (which is difficult to maintain, I agree). And A will be his formr club (which we will add if we remember to). Currently, there are categories for very less players, so it should not be hard to maintain for their former clubs, atm. But, someone has to do.
acagastya PING ME! 16:05, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

As I've remarked elsewhere, I'm not really comfortable with anything that needs maintenance on the categories. We have, at least temporarily, effectively lost the entire portal space because it needed maintenance. We've just about got things to the point where the entire site requires almost no maintenance at all, and we need to stay there. We've got day-to-day news production, we've got long-term improvements, and anything else will need to be carefully orchestrated (I have a technique in mind, but it calls for a more advanced stage of dialog use). --Pi zero (talk) 16:22, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

And so we don't improve categorisation (which, by the way is an internal cat, yes) just because it needs effort. I know it is difficult, but not justified. If you see, WP works on the same way. The information is scattered everywhere yet they manage to do it.
acagastya PING ME! 16:52, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Keeping up with stuff like that is their mission. It's not ours. And they have, comparatively, huge numbers of people to do it. Any thing what we're doing starts to look similar to maintaining an encyclopedia, we've probably strayed from what we should be doing. I do see a way to keep up with such stuff, but I think it'd be a mistake that does anything that increases unsupported burden of those sorts of operations. --Pi zero (talk) 17:02, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
again, what you are missing is the perks of having a list of news articles of former players of a club.
acagastya PING ME! 23:22, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

---

And idea how to use mapframe?
acagastya PING ME! 16:52, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

I know there's an imagemap at WN:Archives. I had in mind, as a target for dialog-based semi-automation, a tool for building and maintaining imagemaps, because it's pretty opaque and the one at WN:Archives wants updating for the new version I started developing at User:Pi zero/Archives; but all that has ground to a halt waiting for me to debug my context-sensitive-parameter device. --Pi zero (talk) 17:02, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

---

DPL works for the pages in main space, or does it support namespace pages also?
acagastya PING ME! 05:17, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: You can specify the namespace in which pages will be matched, or you can get a list of pages regardless of namespace. However, there's no transitive closure: you can get a list of pages that belong to a certain category (up to six categories, which is a very small number in practice), but you can't get a list of pages that belong to any category that belongs to a certain category. So you can list all published articles belonging to CAT:Real Madrid (listing all published articles takes up several of the six category slots available for a DPL, demonstrating that six is a small number in practice), or you can list all published articles belonging to CAT:Dani Carvajal, or you can list all categories belonging to CAT:Real Madrid; that third one would atm list the categories of five players — but there is no way for a DPL to list all published articles belonging to categories that belong to CAT:Real Madrid. The fact that CAT:Dani Carvajal belongs to CAT:Real Madrid is, in practice, simply a reminder to human beings about the relationship between the two. If a human being is browsing on the site, it's a reminder to the human being that there's a connection between the player and team. If a human being is adding an article to the category for the player, it's a reminder to the human being that they should consider whether the article also should be in CAT:Real Madrid; the answer might be yes or no. Of course, if we were talking about geocats like CAT:Nebraska and CAT:United States, the answer would always be yes (articles listed under nebraska must also be listed under united states — which is because we want a DPL for United States to include everything in Nebraska; it's how we have things set up, and how we have had them set up for many years). Anyway, as I was saying, we can browse about — and we could have a semi-automated assistant help us browse about — but there are strict limits on what we can directly conjure a DPL to list. --Pi zero (talk) 12:35, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Re. abandoning "FOIA attack on 'Restoring Internet freedom'"

On 12:53, 31 August 2017 (UTC), I posted questions, explaining I did not understand your 22:30, 30 August 2017 (UTC) review that the article was "Not ready." I cannot address issues that I do not understand.

Now, Sept. 18, you just marked the article "abandoned". Clearly, that article was abandoned, but not by me. What should I have done to get answers to questions? Should I precede questions with {{ping|Pi zero}}?

Background

I posted the first version of the article on 00:26, 24 August 2017‎ (UTC), regarding a filing with fcc.gov by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That filing was made August 21 (Eastern time, US) but was not published on fcc.gov until August 22. I found it there on August 23 and thought it was sufficiently timely, I could write about it. I posted the first draft of the article on August 23 [Central time, US; 00:26, 24 August 2017‎ (UTC)]. If I understand correctly, per Wikinews:Pillars of Wikinews writing, the key event must have "happened within the past day or two".

So what do you count as the key event here? The August 21 filing or the August 22 publication? People contacted directly by the Electronic Frontier Foundation may have learned of it August 21, but that's not clear.

Later, on August 24, I learned of an article in Techdirt pubished Thu, Aug 24th 2017 6:25am quoting something that "Pai told Ars today". However, it's not clear from that article whether "today" was August 22 or 23 or 24 -- and I was unable to clarify what "today" meant in that context.

For reasons I don't understand, the article I drafted did not get an official "review" until two days later, August 26, by which time the article was over 2 days after the event and therefore no longer "fresh", unless we start the clock from the August 24 Techdirt article. I tried to respond that same day and the next to the concerns identified in that "review", while asking questions about the points I did not understand.

Eventually, it got another "review" on August 30, which only said, "The problem was not successfully addressed." I posted a reply explaining that I did not understand the problem. I'm still waiting for a reply to that question. I would have tried to addressed the problem quickly if I had understood your concerns.

However, that review was already at least 6 days after the event, which meant that it would have failed on the "freshness" criterion even if I had been able to fix all the other issues. That in turn meant that it was no longer worth my time to try to do any more with it.

Still, it would be nice to know for the future if there is a way to get more information about deficiencies you see in a draft article.  ????

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:36, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

So?

What do you think of the article? Quinton Feldberg (talk) 02:58, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

@Quinton Feldberg: If I attempt a review tonight — the past few years, I'm usually too tired by this time of evening (where I am) to review — I figure on doing one of the really short ones. My first major step in reviewing any article (after perhaps some general copyedits, such as I did to the Trump–Korea one) is to do a preliminary, partially automation-assisted, comparison for too-close similarities to sources. I hope to tackle Trump–Korea tomorrow morning (that'd be about either hours from now, plus or minus). --Pi zero (talk) 03:19, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your help! Quinton Feldberg (talk) 03:27, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Now? Quinton Feldberg (talk) 13:20, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

The article has now been rewritten and reorganized and scores 0% on an online plagiarism detector. If any copyvio is still present, please point to specific examples. Quinton Feldberg (talk) 01:40, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

The spambot...

...has returned. Quinton Feldberg (talk) 13:02, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Indeed. --Pi zero (talk) 13:06, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

First Star Trek series in twelve years debuts on television

Can you please take a look at this? Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:57, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: A few things that immediately caught my eye:

• The sources should be listed from newest to oldest (i.e., reverse chronological order).
• The lede is atm quite long. A good lede is quite short, possibly only one sentence; it only succinctly answers as many as reasonably possible of the five Ws and an H about the focal event, often only spending a few words on each, leaving details, more difficult questions, and peripheral information and context for later in the inverted pyramid. Most of the material currently in the lede should move to some later paragraph (sometimes one can simply split the lede into two paragraphs).
• The current lede does not say when the focal event took place (yes, I realize the timing involved). That information needs to be there.
• Before the article is submitted for review, it will need to provide a source (or OR) bearing witness that the focal event actually happened; naturally, atm the sources (which are all some days old) can only corroborate that it was scheduled to happen.

--Pi zero (talk) 23:34, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I addressed all of the above except the last one. It airs in several minutes, so something will come up shortly and I'll cite that once it literally airs. I'm just trying to do as much legwork beforehand as possible. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:12, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Do you think it can be published? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:05, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Can you access this link?

BBC?
acagastya PING ME! 15:56, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It seems accessible to me, yes. --Pi zero (talk) 16:53, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Deletion

How does The_Vulcan_Hello interfere with anything? There is an incoming link from en.wp which will now lead nowhere. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:26, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

A link using {{w}} to The Vulcan Hello goes to a local target if there is one, otherwise to (by default) Wikipedia. In fact, there is such a link in our article. That link should go to Wikipedia until and unless, for some reason, we end up with three published articles about "The Vulcan Hello" and therefore create a category which then gets a mainspace redirect. (It's unlikely we would have three articles about that one episode, but who knows?) --Pi zero (talk) 19:34, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I have modified it to conform with the sources plus added the proper foreign=force| to the template. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:47, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: I realize you're trying to reconcile the various impulses that are coming from different directions, but I'd rather not use foreign=force with it; what if we did have some reason someday to create a local link for it? That flexibility to automatically allow for future changes is one of the several major purposes of {{w}}. Why should we disarrange ourselves in order to conform to bullying cultural imperialism from Wikipedia? (I remember a story from years back about how Sesame Street taught kids to dial 911 in an emergency, and Australians were incensed because they were looking at having to spend a great pile of money to rewire their phone systems, which used a different emergency number than Sesame Street was teaching their kids to dial.)

Btw, I've got an {{under review}} tag on that article, asking that people please not edit it directly. --Pi zero (talk) 20:04, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

But "The Vulcan Hello" could never be a news article title... Plus, the event has already happened. It's hardly a bullying or imperialism but quite the opposite: I personally added a link from en.wp and wrote this local story precisely because I wanted to increase visibility of Wikinews. I'm not going to fight you on this (I respect your opinion)--I just want you to understand what is happening here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:09, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: Yeah, okay. I'm allowing it. --Pi zero (talk) 20:19, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I hope you understand what I'm going for here--not just pushback for bickering's sake. And thanks for helping me push along the story--I'd really like to get it published. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:34, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I got a bit tangled in the edits made during the review. But, published. --Pi zero (talk) 21:38, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

There are a ton of abandoned articles

Can you delete them? Quinton Feldberg (talk) 00:21, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

And garbage articles, as well. Quinton Feldberg (talk) 00:24, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

I see what I can do later this evening, when I'm no longer alert enough for more delicate stuff that needs doing. (No point needlessly spending high-quality time on it). --Pi zero (talk) 00:27, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Deleted comments page?

In the log it says:

• 01:03, 6 October 2017 Pi zero (talk · contribs) deleted page Comments talk:US rock artist Tom Petty dies at 66 (Test page: (and the only contributor was Quinton Feldberg))

But when I go to Comments:US rock artist Tom Petty dies at 66, it still shows up as being there. Why? Quinton Feldberg (talk) 04:29, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

The extension we use for comments discussion, LQT (short for Liquid Threads) — which everyone loves to hate but, I understand, actually serves the purpose better than wiki pages of discussion as Wikinews used in Elder Days — is structured in such a way that each comments page also has its own talk page, just as an article has its talk page, a user page has its talk page, a template has its talk page. But the talk page of a comments page is, for the most part, a singularly useless thing, a place where remarks would go to get permanently lost. --Pi zero (talk) 12:36, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh... it was Comments talk:US rock artist Tom Petty dies at 66, not Comments:US rock artist Tom Petty dies at 66. Okay, that makes a lot more sense! Quinton Feldberg (talk) 15:15, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your edits to the article I reviewed. I figured that someone else should see which of acagastya's edit's were good to go ahead, because it's always better for a disinterested 3rd party to look at that kind of thing:). It's also been a few years since I did a review, and I appreciate the double check. It looks like I missed a few things, such as double checking interwiki links to make sure that there wasn't a local link that could be used instead. — Gopher65_talk 17:00, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

@Gopher65: Thanks for the review. :-)

The interwikis are not a big deal imho; Darkfrog24 likes to localize them as soon as possible, which is find if that's xyr preference, but there are other plausible approaches such as waiting until an article is archived. The significant thing in acagastya's edits seemed to me to be 1985 versus 2015. --Pi zero (talk) 17:06, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Good luck; don't worry

I hope you feel better/life stops being out of shape soon. Let me worry about the article timeline. Darkfrog24 (talk) 02:55, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

deprecating wiki syntax as the primary input method

I just stumbled across a (now archived) comment you made on this page: From what I hear (I wasn't there, but I believe my source), a conscious —and staggeringly bad, imo— decision was made over a decade ago, to effectively deprecate wiki markup. Opportunities to improve wiki markup have been passed up. --Pi zero (talk) 02:32, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

In case you were looking for it, here it is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Feature_map. It appears the first public posting was April 2011‎ by Eloquence. (Yeay Eloquence, sarcasm.)

The VisualEditor strategy plan, before the project was even named:

Rich-text editor: Technology to deprecate wiki syntax as the primary input method used to create content in Wikimedia projects

A few related points, which you may or may not be up-to-date on:

• The WMF has decided to deprecate the current wikitext editor itself. They expect to move us all into the VisualEditor. But never fear! They have a plan! They've been building a wikitext mode inside of VE for us! Errm, well... it has a few problems... and a little tiny unimportant consensus against it. On large pages, VE has all of the nimbleness and performance of a beached whale. The last time I tried the "wikitext mode" to preview the United States article it took over 60 seconds. And because Flow was so hugely successful, they decided to steal one of the Flow's most super-duper most awesomest ideas! Since new "wikitext editor" is built inside VE, who needs real previews?! Just use VE itself for a simulated preview! The WMF has been pretty much ignoring the minor "consensus against it" detail, and they're very very slowly coasting the project forwards. They did figure out how to (at least partialy) fix the fake-preview problem. Simple: They want to change read-view of all pages to use the VE-rendering engine Parsoid.
  • Changing read-view to use the VE-rendering engine Parsoid would obviously break countless pages. So the WMF decided to declare certain perfectly-working wikitext to be "wikitext markup errors". They're asking volunteers to spend massive time "fixing" these "errors" on hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of pages... hoping we'll fix much of the Parsoid-breakage long before an eventual switchover.
• As part of "deprecate wiki syntax as the primary input method", the WMF has been doing a stealth switchover of all wikis to "VisualEditor-primary", making VE the default editor for new users. Not only is the new default concealed from existing users, if you log out and create a new account a browser cookie for editing-mode will still effectively conceal the new default from you. The WMF deployed this on EnWiki, and after a rather ugly fight we wrote (but didn't deploy) a sitewide javascript hack to override it. Then the default was changed to Wikitext - for EnWiki only.
  • The WMF is moving very very slowly to roll out the new default everywhere. Let me know if you'd like to run an RFC on Wikinews or anywhere else to assert a local choice before this is rolled out. I can supply relevant links and details. Note: Any RFC on this should be styled as a "Wikitext-primary" or "VE-Primary" question, not a support/oppose proposal. A support/oppose style can invite poorly-reasoned anti-WMF supports as well as outright dysfunctional anti-anti-WMF opposes. A Wikitext-primary/VE-primary style better focuses discussion on the available options, and reduces the risk of an unhelpful no-consensus.
• Less related, but noteworthy: In the last few days the WMF's efforts to promote Wikidata on other wikis damn near crashed Commons and several Wikipedias. (Wikis that most heavily used wikidata were most seriously affected.) A database admin jumped into bad-ass mode, grin. They chewed out the wikidata people for nearly "breaking Wikipedia", and announced he was unilaterally taking charge of the situation and rolling back the feature as an emergency action.[2]

For the last six and a half years this visual-tail has been wagging the wiki-dog. The WMF consistently ignores or neglects core wikitext infrastructure because they're too busy chasing visual butterflies. For example one of the big Community-tech projects we asked for was to improve a variety of cases of awful diffs, such as moved paragraphs. The WMF rated it as a high-community-support high-impact project, then dropped work on it to go build a visual-butterflies visual-diff instead. Alsee (talk) 19:32, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

@Alsee: I'd have to reconsult my source to be sure, but I think they said they'd heard Erik Möller (Eloquence) express the essence of the deprecate-wiki-markup concept in a remark in... 2004? --Pi zero (talk) 19:59, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

(Implying that deprecating wiki markup has been the Foundation's de facto agenda for as long as the Foundation has existed.) --Pi zero (talk) 20:02, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Ping me if come up with more info. Alsee (talk) 20:59, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

User:Francisco Leandro

Please delete my user page. It will be replaced by Meta's global page. Thanks. --Francisco (talk) 22:14, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Done. :-)  --Pi zero (talk) 22:16, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Delete page to complete the renaming process

Hello, Can you please delete this page (User talk:مصطفى الاكادورى)? because I wanna complete the usurpation process (i.e I forgot to suppress creation of redirects). Thanks علاء (talk) 12:24, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Done --Pi zero (talk) 12:35, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks علاء (talk) 17:25, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest?

No problem on this end. No more articles. News is news no matter who writs it. Just ask Breibart, or Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch or any of the sources of news that Wikinews cannot come close to competing with. As long as its honest, and truthful and not written for personal gain how can there be a conflict of interest in trying to get a story about governmental corruption out to the public? In reality its Wikinews who has the conflict of interest. I migh just be able to come up with some facts that indicate this.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Codeforepub (talk • contribs)

Why even argue, when that article (the second one) was not even newsw?
acagastya PING ME! 16:29, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

One suspects that's a typo for "Breitbart". I feel truly sorry for someone who has somehow failed to recognize that Breitbart and its ilk are neither honest nor truthful; but I don't know how to help such a person find their way. --Pi zero (talk) 16:48, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Lupin's famous navigational pop-ups.

Is this working for you? It isn't working even when I added the script in my vector.js Is it broken? (But that works on Wikipedia.)
acagastya PING ME! 03:53, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Looks like you are disconnected from IRC.
acagastya PING ME! 14:33, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, my laptop crashed. I'm in the process of getting things set up again; back on IRC soon. --Pi zero (talk) 15:10, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Although I've seen the gadget mentioned in our site configuration, I've never used it and don't really know what it does. --Pi zero (talk) 16:08, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Do you want to try it?
acagastya PING ME! 06:55, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

You might want to save this link

Why we should not rely on machine translation.
acagastya PING ME! 11:26, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oy vey.

The truly sad part is at the end of the article — he took down the post. --Pi zero (talk) 11:41, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Just to let you know

I am planning to attend a Comic Con in Bangalore on December 2. I have never been to one, and I always wanted to write about it. I could see the archives to get some idea, which I would have to, but I wanted someone to share their first hand experience. I have emailed Bddpaux and Zanimum about it. But I want to know, what are some of the things I should remember for reporting about it? What are required elements, or important things for a Comic Con article? And what are the problems you would generally face while reviewing a Comic Con. Any tips or advice? Also to let you know, my semester end exam is on December 4, so I need to prepare a draft as soon as possible.
acagastya PING ME! 07:56, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Some categorisation work

1. Category talk:Dani Alves
2. Category talk:Wayne Rooney
3. Category talk:Diego Costa
4. Category talk:Everton FC
5. Category talk:FC Zenit Saint Petersburg
6. Category talk:AZ Alkmaar

acagastya PING ME! 07:51, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the best way is to create the category page, dump the list of the articles on its talk, and list that category on Wikinews:Categories and topic pages/Pending‎. Sounds good?
acagastya PING ME! 11:05, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: I would suggest using {{editprotected}} on a list like that. That template is meant to draw the attention of the very people whose attention one wants to draw to the list. --Pi zero (talk) 12:20, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Quotation on your talk page

I saw "He writes the words "Who What Where When Why and How" on the blackboard. Then he dictates a set of facts to us [...] We turn in our leads. We're very proud. Mr. Sims looks at what we've done and then tosses everything into the garbage. He says, "The lead to the story is 'There will be no school Thursday.' "" on the top, just now, but due to text shadow, it is difficult to read. Could be due to the blur radius you have used (2px), or because of the typeface (mine shows Comic Sans on Windows, and I assume Chalkboard on iOS, and many people hate those fonts) Try to tweak the shadow (that is the third one `2px 1px 2px #888888`), either 0 or something greater than 5px. It isn't the best thing to fix right now, but it shouldn't take much time. (Also, I think you should archive some comments)
acagastya PING ME! 08:00, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't know if you changed it, but the typeface looks beautiful on iPad.
103.6.156.41 (talk) 09:49, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

I haven't gotten around to changing it. --Pi zero (talk) 11:43, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Abandoned

Is there a way to generate a list of articles flagged abandoned and they are supposed to be deleted (meaning it has been there for more than 48 hours)
acagastya PING ME! 07:17, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I doubt it. We might be able to craft some well-chosen augmentation of dialog's query abilities that would allow it to do that. I would want to think that through very carefully because there are other kinds of enhanced DPL I'd want dialog to be able to do, and we'd want to craft an augmentation for maximum general utility. --Pi zero (talk) 12:04, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Okay. I assume there is no way of knowing list of pages using a file (say) ABC, if it was deleted from Commons, can we?
acagastya PING ME! 12:06, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

There used to be a bot on Commons, operated by User:Fæ, that notified when an image used on any Wikinews was nominated for deletion. I used to follow that as a way of at least knowing when such deletions happened, and had always figured eventually I should teach myself basic procedure for rescuing such pages before they were actually deleted (rather than simply knowing to add {{missing image}} when they went away, though even knowing when to do that was great). However, the bot broke sometime last year iirc. --Pi zero (talk) 12:59, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Unreviewed paged

What to do about UnreviewedPages?
acagastya PING ME! 07:22, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Lots and lots of pages from before review era (BRE?) are unreviewed. Just on a quick check I counted at least 5000 there; I wouldn't be surprised if there were twice that or more. We have never had a clear policy, or even a systematic practice, on grounds to sight ancient unreviewed articles. I think BRS has thought a bit about this; I recall once or twice seeing xem sight such articles, though I wasn't sure what criterion xe had in mind for doing it. But in itself I don't think unreview represents a variety of to-do list. Unfortunately, DPLs can't combine with special pages (part of the general gross underpowering of DPLs), so we can't easily produce a list of pages that are unreviewed, published, and fully protected; that's another case we might consider when trying to craft a suitable augmentation for dialog. --Pi zero (talk) 12:43, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

So, it is pointless to review it now, right?
•–• 18:01, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Football clubs

So I was dealing with Category:Wigan Athletic F.C. when I realised we have added the categories of football leagues to clubs. However, it is possible a club would be relegated. Like for example -- Aston Villa. We do not have its category at the moment but we have enough articles for a category. So should we change football leagues to the countries they represent? Another thing to note -- there are some clubs like AS Monaco (from Monaco) who plays in the French league. Thoughts?
acagastya PING ME! 11:26, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

In the case of AS Monaco, one might argue it would appropriate to add it to both categories Monaco and France.

As I recall, we had discussed the possibility of categorizing an individual player under all the teams they have played for, so that when they move to a new team, the old team category stays and the new one gets added; we might do the same thing when a team moves to a different league, keeping the old league category and adding the new. --Pi zero (talk) 12:49, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

We hardly cover news from lower division leagues. Besides these are two different things. That was "players played for club X". For leagues, it can be misleading.
acagastya PING ME! 13:08, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Things visible to reviewers

When we have reviewer bits, we can see that box to accept or reject changes. I had noticed there was a CSS class specifying "reviewers-only" on Wikibooks. I am not sure if that is how it works, but can't we implement admin dashboard in that manner?
103.6.156.41 (talk) 09:55, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

There are things in the skins that are visible only to admins; likely one could learn how to do that in css by studying the skins. I think there's also a magic word, which would provide the information at a different level. --Pi zero (talk) 11:54, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Have you thought about…

…wikifying and categorising archived articles that were published on that day? Assuming we have 22k articles, we would have to deal with 60 articles a day and even if we spend just a minute, it would take one hour. That is a lot of work.
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 02:02, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

now that I have mentioned it, can dialog tools handle date categories?
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 02:04, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

@Agastya: I envision a tool vaguely similar to HotCat, that would convert hard wikipedia links [[w:...]] to use {{w}}, then would find all {{w}} links that have local targets, and examine each one to determine whether it goes to a category that's already on the article (in which case it should offer to make make it a hard local link), goes to a category that's not already on the article (offer to add the category, and then, as a separate decision, offer to make it hard local link), or goes to a disambig (offer to refine the target, and then recurse on the refined link).

I've concluded there's a significant mental burden associated with having to make lots of tedious little decisions, and just relieving the user of those might be much more important than just how quickly it's done (within reason). --Pi zero (talk) 04:43, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

Ask to re-review an article

Hello sir, A long time ago I have been updated and adjusted an article. However it is not reviewed. Can you check please the news for conformity to parameters? sovomimocd 18.40, 8 November 2017 (UTC) Sovomimocd (talk) 16:41, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

@Sovomimocd: Hello. I am aware of the article. While actual review is a major undertaking, so that my opportunities to do reviews are less frequent, I do track the review queue. Hopefully (unless something goes wrong irl, which is always possible), I will have an opportunity to review your article in a few hours. --Pi zero (talk) 17:04, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Hello sir, thank you for your answer. Can I ask a quesion? Do this article still have chance to be published, when all the updates of an article will be done? --Sovomimocd (talk) 23:29, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

@Sovomimocd: Unfortunately, I don't see how it can. We would need a more recent development, and since the marathon has already ended, that seems unlikely. --Pi zero (talk) 01:40, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Sir, I did changes in article (upgraded) some details which you recommend to do. Can you check please the news for conformity the parameters? How I can do it better if need to do it?

Also question about timeline? I did an article the day next after event, because use the new source which found at the same day. It means that my article was created in time. And I only waited more days that somebody will review it. In this reason possible that the article in the end will be published? When I say "published", I means that this article will be in history of Wikinews in the day November 5, 2017 - the day when it was created... Sincerely, --User:Sovomimocd (talk) 20:41, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Interpersonal conflicts

You don't have to get involved. You're not in the way. Your involvement has largely been helpful so far, to diffuse things, but it is absolutely not your job to fix the problems between Acagastya and me and I have been making a conscious effort not to put you in the middle. I don't see Acagastya trying to drag you in either, so bully for him. I don't mind, not at all, but I'm saying right here that it's not your job and you don't have to. Talk when you feel like talking. Darkfrog24 (talk) 17:05, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Please re-check the news

@Pi zero: Sir, I did changes in article (upgraded) some details which you recommend to do. Can you check please the news for conformity the parameters? How I can do it better if need to do it? Also question about timeline? I did an article the day next after event, because use the new source which found at the same day. It means that my article was created in time. And I only waited more days that somebody will review it. In this reason possible that the article in the end will be published? When I say "published", I means that this article will be in history of Wikinews in the day November 5, 2017 - the day when it was created... Sincerely, --Sovomimocd (talk) 20:18, 10 November 2017 (UTC) Sovomimocd (talk) 18:29, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

@Sovomimocd: The markup you want, in order to ping me, is like this: {{ping|Pi zero}}

When we publish an article, the date that appears on the article is the date on which we publish it, rather than the date that it was first written. We measure freshness at the moment of publication, too. I hope to take a look at what you've done, and offer feedback to you. And you were absolutely correct, at the time, to choose the end of the conference as a focal event, giving reviewers as much time as possible in which to review it. Unfortunately, no volunteer reviewer got to it soon enough. --Pi zero (talk) 18:39, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: thank you sir. Will be wait on your recommends and advices. Sovomimocd (talk) 20:49, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Special:PendingChanges

Is it possible to obtain the number of pages with pending changes for voting/admin dashboard template?
•–• 18:31, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps. We have the pieces; I'm trying to cobble something together. We have Special:PendingChanges, which when transcluded is a list. And we have {{evalx}} with which to measure the length of the list. --Pi zero (talk) 22:27, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Nope. It doesn't work. This is, bluntly, because the Foundation deliberately treats wiki markup as a kludge to be discarded casually rather than an asset to be nurtured as a design priority. Special:PendingChanges doesn't provide data at the wiki markup level; at template expansion time it provides a string that is substituted for later. To see this,

{{evalx|(list (get-arg 2))|{{Special:PendingChanges}}}}

produces

( "'""`UNIQ--item-55--QINU`""'" )

--Pi zero (talk) 22:41, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Prototype

Speedy deletion requests: 30  Pages to be protected: 1  Categories to be populated: 12  flagged pages: 12  Abandoned pages: 35  Pages to be wikified: 0  Protected pages to be renamed: 2 

Unused fair-use files: 12  Files on Commons: 6  Pages to sight: 0  Add categories: 0  Remove categories: 0  Issue correction: 2  Refresh

New Pages • Upload log

Deletion log
Review log
Move log

Links: [[Special:WhatLinksHere/{{{1}}}]]
Looks good? At least eleven more are to be added. Otherwise it would have been one line cute dashboard for the admins.
•–• 20:13, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

This seems like quite an elaborate interface. I'm worried that anything with this complicated a dashboard is likely to be too complicated to use at the request end of things; eventually I would hope to have dialog-based semi-automation to help, maybe, but for now it seems likely you will be the only user able to figure out how to make requests that show up on the envisioned dashboard. --Pi zero (talk) 05:25, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

It is not that difficult. For example, if there is a page marked for deletion, {{delete}} would add Category: Speedy deletion to that page, and it appears in the category. In this template, there is an element "Speedy deletion requests", which is linked to that category which contains list of all the pages to be deleted. Just like how {{review}} works.

People might not know about the new templates (so in roygbiv, it will be):

• {{delete}}
• {{makeprotected}} **
• {{fill this category}} **
• {{flag}}
• {{abandoned}}
• {{wikify}} **
• {{moveprotected}} **

You would get to know once you try it (if you try, because you have admin rights, and you don't need to request anyone else) Consider it like how editprotected works. Those marked with ** are the new ones, and one needs to explain why to perform those edits.
•–• 05:47, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Um, how about we try it later today? We will deal with one page in each category. Okay?
•–• 06:06, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Some of them are subsets of editprotected. For example, {{add category}}. It specifies what type of edit is requested for a protected page. (By the way, I realised why editprotected can never be replaced completely -- something we were discussing few days ago)
•–• 07:30, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Heh. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of keeping track of all these. (I notice in your example you refer to another one that wasn't on your earlier list.) There are a whole lot of templates for noting problems with articles, you know, dating afaik from the earliest days of the project, long before review. In recent years they tended to be used only by some oldtimers, such as brianmc, who were familiar with them. Things moved toward {{cleanup}}, then (I think) toward {{tasks}} which has, or had, a complicated interface that people weren't expected to apply by hand, mostly, it would mostly be set up by the review gadget, and now even that doesn't get displayed, it just refers you to the review template on the talk page. --Pi zero (talk) 14:45, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Category rename

Just now, I checked Category:FC Barcelona can be moved. (Category:Published can be moved too) If someone moves that page, and breaks the redirect, won't that result in serious complications?
•–• 07:40, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, it would temporarily mess things up a bit. Generally we haven't gone in for blanket protections just because somebody might vandalize a page; there ought to be some reason the damage would be especially egregious, so that it would be insufficient to fix the damage after it happens. --Pi zero (talk)

Categories

You might have noticed I had added categories to Category:Dani Alves before it was populated and revision was accepted. But because of that, Category:Dani Alves appeared in Brazil and PSG's category. I could have commented it, and added it once it was populated, but I want to know if it is possible to display subcategories only if they are sighted?
•–• 17:06, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Nope. The Foundation couldn't care less about us, so the fact that would be vastly more useful to us, and not having it interferes with our operations, is irrelevant next to it not fitting with the technical priorities they imagine will promote the agenda they imagine will, in turn, promote their (unintentionally volunteer-unfriendly) vision for Wikipedia. --Pi zero (talk) 17:49, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

What do you suggest? I should comment the categories so that I do not make Wikinews look "ugly"? (I should add a note on talk page that categories were commented, please uncomment it and accept the revision.)
•–• 18:05, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

I suggesting going ahead with adding parent categories to new categories that haven't been populated yet. It's not going to lead a lot of people to the new category; not nearly as much as creating a mainspace redirect would. --Pi zero (talk) 18:10, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Fascist

Is it neutral to use this word? Can it be replaced with far-right? I don't think using a word which suggests that we are making the call something was "extreme" should be avoided.
•–• 20:35, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: "Fascist" has a specific technical meaning. Whether it's appropriate to the case, I haven't studied. --Pi zero (talk) 21:17, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Rancho Tehama shootings

Thanks again, and I'm learning a lot, esp. about what Wikinews means by neutrality. CNN did have the deliberate collision: "also gunning down someone after he purposely crashed into another car". And it was multiple shootings in different locations, so shouldn't it be moved again, to "shootings" or "series of shootings"? Yngvadottir (talk) 05:21, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir:

• Our use of 'deliberately' would require a great deal of scrutiny, at best. Anything that comes close to people's intentions can be tricky, and that on top of trying to even know what actually happened (which often calls for us to report the evidence for what happened rather than asserting as objective fact that it did happen). Even with a source saying he did it 'purposely', the question that springs to mind is, how do they know? Perhaps it's based on a witness account of the incident? If so, we'd probably want to report the evidence rather than assert the intention as fact, which of course would be wordier.
• I agree it would have been plausible to use 'shootings' in the headline; I'll suggest, though, that 'shooting' works too. 'A shooting' can be an incident with multiple shots fired. This might be called 'shootings at multiple locations', but it also seems to me plausible to call it 'a multi-location shooting' since there was evidently just one shooter.

I tried to provide helpful feedback in my review comments. Thank you for writing the piece. --Pi zero (talk) 12:11, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Haaretz; The New York Times

(Did not know if I should ask you or at WN:WC/misc) These publishers often paywall their content. I need to clear cache, use VPN or access from another device whenever I need to view the content. Should we really use those as source/encourage its usage? I am really against using them as source. Considering there are very few reliable Israeli news source in English (JPost, Times of Israel), I still do not think we should encourage paywalled websites. WHat do you suggest?
•–• 13:41, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: We have an explicit policy that says no pay-to-read sources. I've not dealt with Haartez much lately, so have no remarks on that off hand. I used to be quite aggressive about not-readying for use of NYT sources but doing so created a mess because (1) alternative sources of information almost never really cover all the facts used from the paywalled source, often they're not even close, and of course for reviewers each fact not in the sources creates massive extra work; and (2) risk of copyvio is not decreased by introducing alternative sources. The NYT paywall is, in fact, absurdly easy to get around, and I got so tired of the messes created by rejecting NYT sources that I got lazier and lazier about objecting to NYT. But I should be routinely at least objecting to NYT sources and warning not to continue using them, if not rejecting them outright. --Pi zero (talk) 14:05, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

If we publish an article which uses paywall source, and there was a serious mistake in it, and the source has paywalled the content strictly, what would we do? As a reviewer, I can not-ready an article if I can not access the source(s), at that time, if the reporter says to follow some steps to access the content, should I do that? (We have done this in past -- remember for UEFA Euro 2016, you could not see the FIFA content in English, so I asked you to switch to French -- though I asked you to replace the source, of-wiki, and said, if you face this problem again, language change would work.)
•–• 16:01, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

@Acagastya: We should not be publishing an article with a paywalled source. We really should not be bypassing a paywall to access a source, as that source is evidently using that paywall as part of their economic livelihood and we should respect their desire to not make their material accessible to us. But, when it comes to marginal cases, well, all details of the situation may matter to how we handle a particular case. One way or another, we must have access to all the sources in order to review. --Pi zero (talk) 16:26, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

So, you using French version of FIFA website for verifying what happened in a football match if the English version is not working is okay? After all, they are not paywalled, and it is probably due to JS/cookie policy. [We never figured that out, did we?] Though that should not happen ideally.
•–• 16:29, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Accreditation_requests#Acagastya

I've been pinged about this one. Looks to have the same support as the prior approved accreditation. And, the user in question is interested in attending a ComicCon for Wikinews. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 07:16, 21 November 2017 (UTC)