In the famous Wikinews portal an interesting case was made on 2019-05-12. According to the logfile somebody created a new article with the title “Fortnite E-Sports Player, Mohamed Bah wins”. Before the article gets deleted, I've saved a backup copy on my local drive which includes all the images as well. The reason is, that from analyzing previous logs it was known, that around 30-60 minutes after an article was created the Wikinews admin will press the delete button to remove the content and the he will ban the user as well. The question is, does this action will happen again or not?
Right now, the article was created in the system and i can see the content clearly. It make sense to go step by step through the content. At the end a single sources is given which is a URL to a medium blogpost. At the medium blogpost the same story is explained in detail. Let us verify the source first. If typed in the headline which was about a Fortnite match into a serious news ressource which is https://news.google.com/ and tried to search for the keywords. Unfortunately no other news media has the same headline. If i'm asking the normal Google websearch engine, it will find the medium blog post but not other source. It seems, that the blog post which is referenced in the WIkinews article is the only source available.
Let us discuss about the text. According to a first lookup to the facts and to the instagram profile of the winner of the match, it seems that the information in the paragraph is valid. It seems that the e-sports player exists and it seems, that he has a lot of follower in the social media.
Let us summarize the situation. A Wikinews article was created which is using as a source a blogpost. Mainstream media which are listed in the Google news directory doesn't have reported about the story. The question is now: what will WIkinews do? WIll the admin delete the article with the reason: Spam/Marketing or remains the article in the system and gets a formal review to investigate the article and it's truth value in detail?
The sad answer is, that I don't know. Wikinews is for me a very new project, I can't predict the actions of the admins in detail. One major problem is perhaps, that the story is not mentioned at google news. According to help section, Google news is a reliable source. Does that mean, that the submitted article is automatically spam/marketing entertainment? I'm not sure. The good news is, that we can relax, and monitor the wikinews logfile. All the actions are recorded and it is possible in each iteration to predict the behavior of the admin and the overall wikinews project more easily.
UPDATE
UPDATE
17 minutes after the article was created the Wikinews admin has pressed the delete button. The duration was surprising fast, from previous investigation the assumption was, that it will take at least 30 minutes. But the logfile shows the exact time. It seems, that the admin came to the conclusion that the medium blogpost was not enough. The real reason is unclear, because he didn't inserted the speedy deletation template (which would be the minimum standard) or the alternative would be to create a formal request for deletion. Both was not done, instead the article was deleted without given further details. In the comment in the changelog it was mentioned as a reason “Advertaisment/spam”.
According to the logfile, the user account of the new users wasn't deleted. It is unclear if this will made with a delay or if the user has become a second chance to contribute to the Wikinews project.