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The Wikinewsie Group/Newsletter/5

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The Wikinewsie Group Newsletter

 Sharing news about the group's activities
 and things taking place on local Wikinews projects.

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Key resources
The Wikinewsie Group News
Edition 5, November 8, 2013
Project news
  • The Wikinewsie Group/Local Wikinews policies is the start of a guide that explains local Wikinews project policies with the goal of making it easier to recognise credentials across project, build on accumulated reputation from one project to another and facilitate translation work.
  • Historical Czech Wikinews experiment is a blog entry by Okino that looks at the community impact of allowing writers to write Wikinews articles from a past perspective, IE writing a story about a historical battle as if you were a journalist writing that article the day after it happened. The purpose was to attempt to make Wikinews more collaborative in nature and avoid the time constraints of the immediacy of news reporting. Okino shows that while the reaction to the idea was positive, the true interest in writing the articles of this type was small as the vast majority of them were written by him.
  • A conversation is taking place on Wikinoticias about allowing CC-BY-NC images to be locally uploaded.[1]
  • A conversation is taking place on English Wikinews with a WMF staff member about the future of search and potential special search features for Wikinews projects.[2]
Training materials

Between May 1 and October 31, when The Wikinewsie Group Newsletter first began tracking original reporting taking place across all projects, 227 stories have been published by 78 reporters 14 different language Wikinews projects. The projects with the greatest number of reporters engaged in original reporting were English with 15, Russian with 14, Polish with 13 and French with 10. Beyond these, original there were one or more journalists engaging in original reporting on Catalan, Chinese, Esperanto, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian. The peak month for reporting across all projects was May with 52 articles. It was followed by June with 49, August with 44, September with 43 and July with 39.

A video for new reporters who lost their first article on English Wikinews
  • A one page guide and a screencast were created that explain how to avoid plagiarism on Wikinews. Available data suggests this is somewhat of an issue for new and student reporters on English Wikinews, with roughly 10 to 20% of all submitted articles having some sort of copyright issue.
  • Training materials were created to better support new reporters wanting to produce photo essays. They can be found at Photo Essays for Wikinews, Photojournalist worksheet, and Wikinews Photo Essay Formatting. Assistance is requested in translating these to other languages and localizing them to local project requirements. This would be very helpful ahead of the Sochi Paralympic Games, where there are expected to be a number of photo essays produced.
  • Given the difficulty of new reporters being unable to get their first article published on Wikinews, a video was created to encourage these writers to stick with it. It can be found at The first time writing for Wikinews good.ogv. It is somewhat tongue in cheek, and tries to address the emotional implications of a not ready review. The problem of getting new reporters who are unsuccessful at getting their article published has been identified as a major area for work. It has a large impact on reporter retention.
Of interest for journalists
Education
EduWiki 2013 presentation
  • Provisional Chairperson LauraHale made a presentation at the EduWiki Conference 2013 in Cardiff, Wales about educational efforts on English Wikinews. Findings she included that changes in reviewing practices between semester 1 and semester 2 for one university course saw similar improvements for new reporters. What is good for students is good for the whole community.
  • With the Education Extension[3] installed successfully on English Wikinews, a portal was started at WN:EDU[4] to encourage and provide training for educators to use Wikinews in their coursework. This is something The Wikinewsie Group is hoping to expand upon in the future, and plans to try to get translated into other languages. Plans are also underway to create a student portal to provide training for students. Many things to Sage Ross for his assistance in setting up the educator portal.
GLAM
  • The major GLAM work being done by a Wikinewsie at the moment is a Wikimedian in Residency with the Comité Paralímpico Español. A report was created this month for CPE based on interviews done in August. It can be found here.
  • Paralympic work being done with the US Olympic Committee is progressing.
Original reporting - summary

In the past four months, Spanish, Polish, French, Ukrainian, Russian and English have all produced over 20 total pieces of original reporting, with Russian Wikinews publishing 41 stories and English Wikinews publishing 60 stories.

LauraHale, RockerballAustralia, Antanana, Agamitsudo, Dmitry Rozhkov, Plogi, Krassotkin, Schekinov Alexey Victorovich, and MadriCR have each produced 5 or more pieces of original reporting in the past four months. Another group of users, Joan301009, Bddpaux, Computron, Laslovarga, Fed4ev and Yakudza, have produced four articles each.

For September, only three pieces of 43 original reports produced were translated from one language to another. They were Wikinews interviews specialists on China, Iran, Russia support for al-Assad, Wikinews interviews Dr Thomas Scotto and Dr Steve Hewitt about potential US military intervention in Syria, Atlético de Madrid defeats Real Madrid 1-0 in 2013 derby and Tokio gana la sede de los Juegos Olímpicos 2020. Original reporting is a major strength of Wikinews. It is one we should be playing to. The Wikinewsie Group would like to encourage everyone to assist translating Wikinews work into another language, or finding a local reporter to assist with translating a work from where it was originally published into that language. This will benefit all languages, promote more cooperation between projects, and expand news reach for our reporting which we can leverage to provide more opportunities for reporters.

Original reporting output
Ukrainian
See also: Авторський репортаж. The wiki uses nothing for the publish process.
Spanish
See also: Wikinoticias:Reportajes originales sin notas, Artículos publicados. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
Russian
See also: Оригинальные репортажи, Опубликовано. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
French
See also: Reportage original, Article publié. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
Serbian
See also: Изворни извештај, Објављено. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
Chinese
See also: 原创报导, 已发布. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
Polish
See also: Materiały autorskie. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
English
See also: Original reporting, Published. The wiki uses flagged revisions for the publish process.
German
See also: Wikinews:Originalbericht, Veröffentlicht. The wiki uses a category for the publish process.
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