Wikinews/Open issues
 | This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum. |
Article titles
[edit]How should articles be titled? We probably want to be able to modify and rewrite headlines, so if the title is the headline then the article will have to be moved all over the place. Perhaps the best solution is to just have the key words.
Categories
[edit]Authors and dates should get categories.
Datelines and bylines
[edit]Will we give the date of a reporter? The location it was filed from?
What will Wikinews bylines look like? Presumably collaborative stories won't mention reporters, much like small AP and Reuters wire feeds, but larger ones will?
Historical articles
[edit]Is it possible to write Wikinews summaries of reports for historical events?
Media
[edit]Which of these are appropriate for Wikinews?
- Book summaries
- Movie summaries (e.g. for documentaries)
- Interviews
- with wiki-contributed questions, of course
- Upcoming events / calendars
Ombudsman
[edit]Wikinews should have some sort of office or project to take in feedback from readers and users and think about ways to fix the process and system to better achieve its goals.
- Isn't this almost inherent in the idea of wiki? People are free not only to give feedback but to join in and advocate changes.
Story placement
[edit]How does one decide which stories go on the front page or get more prominent placement? The only fair policy seems to be to list all published stories in reverse chronological order or some similar objective scheme (e.g. perhaps highlighting longer articles).
Topic pages
[edit]Should there be topic pages for ongoing investigations, linking to all related articles?
What about for news topics themselves? In a statement like "Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority died today" it seems like the terms should link to a page that looks like:
Yasser Arafat (Arabic: ياسر عرفات) (born August 4 or August 24, 1929 as Muhammad Abd al-Rahman ar-Rauf al-Qudwah al-Husayni, also known as Abu Ammar) is the President of the Palestinian Authority (leader since 1993, elected to a four-year term in 1996); leader of Fatah and Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (since 1969), and co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. (Read more...)
In the news
- Arafat dies: Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority has died today. ...
- Celebrities team up to beat Bush: ...and ate caviar. Among the gathered was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a somewhat...
- and so on...
Such a page would be automatically generated by grabbing the first paragraph from the associated Wikipedia page and doing a search for links to the topic page.
Perhaps, similarly, Wikipedia pages could have a {{wikinews}} like {{wikiquote}} which pulls in the top headlines for a newsmaker and displays them in a sidebar.
One topic page I'd like to do is a page of interesting stories which aren't receiving attention in the mainstream media.
George Orwell
[edit]- "I watched [the Russian agent] him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists."
- "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."