Wikinews:Water cooler/technical

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Hi

It is a bit challenging to contribute here because drafts need to be written, fact checked and published (with peer review offered by volunteers) within less than 5 days. There are a few phases of article writing and reviewing which require additional software support:

• When a new draft. Easy. There are many of them written each month. Could be guided as they often make errors. I wrote a helper page [1] (JavaScript is freely licensed, I didn’t mark it properly yet for librejs to understand).
  • item 1 move to a more reliable hosting -- Gryllida to do - not critical, as this software can be used straight away and does not host any content on the server. it is entirely client side.
  • item 2 publish code in a git repository -- Gryllida to do - not critical, as the source code is available in 'page source'.
• A draft needs to be announced to all people interested in this topic (e.g. ‘Politics in Egypt’). I wrote a program for this, https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/weabit/ and example generated notification to a new user at https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User_talk:Qwerty_number1#Wikinews_recent_additions_00:32,_12_December_2019_(UTC) This software is working in principle and is all good. It can also send emails.
  • item 3 I need to restart this tool and subscribe users to it again (check with each user if they're still interested) -- Gryllida to do - essential - welcome help from other contributors.
  • item 4 android push notifications are being considered as a third option, link to discussion - nobody working on this - Android developers welcome to either work on it or provide guidance to Gryllida.
• Draft needs to be reviewed. This is a very difficult part. It is time consuming. Each sentence and phrase needs to be checked. I am starting to work on software described here User:Gryllida/minireviewer for this purpose.
  • item 5 Gadget like "on screen edit" is already available but I'm not sure if it's able to save progress after web browser is closed or computer is shut down. more investigation is needed. item untaken.
  • item 6 Another option is to host a wiki instance with mw:Extension:InlineComments installed to comment when a part of text was fact checked. This may cause difficulties when article content needs to be the same between two wikis or something. Feedback wanted, please post below, before this is commenced. Untaken and Gryllida can start working on this after confirming it is desired. This could provide improvement to individual work on review and/or open a venue for collaborative reviewing.
• After successfully being published the draft needs to be announced on social media. There is currently no software that I know of, and this is often done manually. It was Twitter and Facebook. Someone needs to report it on Mastodon and other saner places.
  • item 7 There was some issue with Facebook being spammed. I didn't track whether it was resolved. Someone please check. (Untaken) (High priority, if still unsolved)
  • item 8 Document how articles are being posted to social media with help of what users or what software? (Untaken) (Medium to high priority)

Note I used 'question' template as a 'todo item here', and numbered them manually as issue tracker. I'm not sure what's the best way to handle this. (Edit: I didn't include Google News entry because it is already being discussed above on this page, there is no need to duplicate discussion. 04:06, 26 September 2024 (UTC))

If you know any other system administration or software development queries, please post them here.

I would like to inquire about your feedback about the above processes. Can be discussed here or #wikinews-en ^{live connect}.

Regards, -- Gryllida (talk) 03:51, 26 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

item 9 To notify all reviewers I'm proposing template Template:Allreviewersping which lists usernames of all reviewers as links, generating a notification, and needs to be subst'ed. This could be posted on article talk page when a draft is ready for review, and/or on the 'assistance' water cooler when a question requires attention from a reviewer. I was inserting that manually into the 'assistance' water cooler inquiries and I think it would be nice if reviewers had a chance to either opt in or opt out of such ping by editing the template and adding or removing their nick. Feedback wanted, please post below. Thanks Gryllida (talk) 03:54, 26 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I just noticed that search engines are able to crawl and index developing stories. I think we should change that so that only articles that have been published (sighted) are crawlable by search engines and AI/LLM. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 14:03, 27 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Does mw:Manual:Noindex help? Gryllida (talk) 22:43, 27 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think that will do. Can you add that to {{develop}} similar to what is done at {{prepare}}—it was already on that one, so we must be on the right track. Thanks! —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 00:11, 28 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Done -- Gryllida (talk) 05:51, 28 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Looks harmless to me here? Gryllida (talk) 23:12, 27 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hello

I have created a template for new article here (it is like w:Google Docs but is open source software)

• Template [2] (expires in 90 days)

Example of article here:

• [3] (expires in 90 days)

The purpose is to have ability to highlight parts of draft and parts of source -- can't do this on wiki due to licence restrictions. Any author and any reviewer can copy paste the contents of template into a new pad:

• Click "+ New" to create your pad [4] (new pad expires in 90 days)

I'll let you know what useful comes out of it, maybe it can help me review more consistently.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback. Thanks! Gryllida (talk) 22:12, 3 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I've edited it to include time of last edit to article and article talk (as i check this info manually each time to ensure the article was not un-abandoned) and wanted to also add time when the abandoned template was added to article but this one got stuck as all it does is show five tildas. Please see my edited version at {{Gryllida-Abandoned‎}} and merge these changes into {{abandoned}} if possible (or make your own copy and then i can merge for you). Thanks in advance. Gryllida (talk) 00:05, 8 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I believe the writing is on the wall with the Sibling Project Lifecycle, as Bawolff initially indicated here.

Today I also found that Flagged Revisions, the extension that underpins our ability to protect Published articles is no longer supported and is considered "clunky, complex and not recommended for production use."[5], [6] For a sense of what kind of support we might get if there is a problem with using 'clunky' and unsupported software, read this old WP thread.

We have had a years-long struggle with maintaining an adequate number of active reviewers and have a seriously hard time with regular maintenance such as updating our generations-old copyright license.[7]

We have recently permitted global sysops to assist with everyday admin tasks because we don't have enough active admins to help keep up with the basic work of deleting vandalism.[8]

More often wn.WN is getting essentially scooped by en.WP on news stories. The latest example is Killing of Yahya Sinwar. When viewed or considered as if one wants to shutter en.WN, and if we discount the advantage of peer review (which arguably WP has), there is no real advantage of en.WN publishing our article in addition to the coverage that en.WP already has on that event. WP has much better reach as far as readership, the platform is better-maintained, its impact on the Internet-at-large far exceeds en.WN, and the WP community is highly active.

en.WN by contrast is 1) not highly active, 2) does not significantly impact the wider Internet infrastructure or other wiki projects, 3) lacks the resources necessary to sustainably execute the project's mission, and 4) has a strong external project to merge with; WP. These are four of the six criteria to consider for closing projects.[9]

I personally would like to see this project revitalized and I'm all-in however I can help. We need more urgency and organization from more reviewers and admin to get things turned around and pump some new life into the project. That's not to say only reviewers and admin are needed, but we certainly can't move forward without them.

If you agree and have ideas, please share them here. If you disagree and think I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, please let me know. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 19:10, 18 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Should? Yes. Can? Jury's out.

If you look at community discussions for the past 12 years or so, there are routine discussions about how Wikinews is dying and we need to do x to save it. In reality, when Wikinews was founded, that was the golden age of citizen journalists and semi-professional bloggers, before a lot of that got gobbled up by social media sites (c. 2003 to 2010). I think there's still a place for Wikinews and I hope it's successful, but I'm not very optimistic about any legitimate course for Wikinews to be a place where someone could read the homepage and click thru on a number of articles to be reasonably informed about current affairs, which is the basic measure of whether or not a general interest news site is successful. And since ostensibly, Wikinews has no particular geographic scope (unlike a local newspaper) or point of view (like a political party-run paper or a government propaganda outlet) or limitation on topics (unlike specialist publications), the reasonable amount of stories published on Wikinews to meet its mandate would be several hundred a day at a minimum and ideal maybe... 20,000? about local news, sports, scientific findings, interviews, human interest stories, photojournalism, exposes, investigative journalism, and so on. Wikinews is really orders of magnitude away from where it should be and it would require thousands and thousands of active editors to even approach that, but even if we were just narrowly trying to cover the dozen or so biggest stories of the day, plus some original reporting, that's already a struggle here.

I don't want to be dour, but the situation is dire and I will continue to contribute original reporting to Wikinews and do occasional maintenance, but we should be realistic about how Wikinews is basically irrelevant to the online news landscape and is easily the weakest of all our sister projects. Even other small projects like b: or v: could in principle "catch up" to where they need to be, because it's not like there is an urgent need for a few hundred new textbooks a day, so we could kinda/sorta get around to those sooner or later, but when news becomes old it ceases to be news at all. The problem actually only gets worse day by day. :/

If anyone out there has great brainstorming on how to achieve that goal or get even 1% of the way to it, I'm all ears. Unfortunately, I've chimed in on these conversations many times over the past decade and the problem persists. The only reasonable ideas that I have ever come up with are 1.) having journalism students at universities publish here and 2.) copy news from appropriately-licensed venues. In the past, the community has more-or-less rejected the latter. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:06, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I've written a proposal at water cooler, the idea is to write shorter stories to get them out more quickly. Can do without flagged revs if needed but i'd like to keep it on to prevent spammers from getting into news feed. Gryllida (talk) 11:03, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

(Note that the idea was tested and worked; however needs at least one author and at least one reviewer, i.e. two persons at minimum, so @Koavf and @Michael.C.Wright, you guys are welcome to write a short story once a week in a hope the other reviewer would get it reviewed quickly. Check latest feed for examples.) Gryllida (talk) 11:05, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

For every article a reviewer writes, at least two reviewers' time is consumed. If we think about a reviewer's time being the ability to do work, i.e., publish a story, and one reviewer 'unit' can be spent on any given article to either write/expand it or review it, then any time reviewer units are scarce for the project, reviewer units (I think) should be used to review/coach, not to write/expand.

And I consider myself 1/2 or .5 of a reviewer unit. Reviews take me more time as I learn how to review and publish effectively, accurately, etc. It will also consume another reviewer to double-check my work and possibly issue corrections if the work can't be checked within 24 hours (as has happened).

I believe this is an 'all hands on deck' situation for both reviewers and admins. I'm starting to wonder if the more established or senior reviewers and admins are like the proverbial frogs in boiling water, unaware of how the environment is changing around them. It seems they might be thinking, 'It's always been like this, nothing has collapsed yet, so what's the big deal?'

I went to the front page of en.Wikipedia today and there is a section titled "In The News." None of the links in that section point to en.WN. None of the linked articles have 'sister links' to en.WN articles. We're already effectively replaced.

I don't want to be dour, but the situation is dire...but we should be realistic about how Wikinews is basically irrelevant to the online news landscape and is easily the weakest of all our sister projects. I agree with Justin's assessment and I think the only way we change the situation is 1. more active reviewers and 2. some sort of updated (faster/easier/more-efficient) way of reviewing. We need the first in order to accomplish the second. —Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Published) 00:53, 20 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Replied at the 'assistance' water cooler page. Gryllida (talk) 02:19, 20 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Global sysops isn't needed now i believe. Mon to Fri i'm helping when there's not a class. I'm sure we can find a couple more volunteers if my proposed model continues. See also more details.... Gryllida (talk) 11:08, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hello everyone, I previously wrote on the 27th September to advise that the Wikidata item sitelink will change places in the sidebar menu, moving from the General section into the In Other Projects section. The scheduled rollout date of 04.10.2024 was delayed due to a necessary request for Mobile/MinervaNeue skin. I am happy to inform that the global rollout can now proceed and will occur later today, 22.10.2024 at 15:00 UTC-2. Please let us know if you notice any problems or bugs after this change. There should be no need for null-edits or purging cache for the changes to occur. Kind regards, -Danny Benjafield (WMDE) 11:29, 22 October 2024 (UTC)Reply