May 12, 2019

Catching a minimal Wikinews article


In the meantime, i've analyzed the deletion behavior of the Wikinews admins and also investigated the version history of some successful submitted article to the Wikinews platform. The essence is, that the minimal Wikinews article should contain of two paragraphs with text, an image is not needed and at the end, two sources are needed which comes from Google news. If only one source is put in the text or if the source comes not from Google news but is a blogpost the admin will delete the article without asking back.
According to the information from the previous actions in Wikinews the basic article (two textparagraph+two google news sources) won't be deleted but put into the review queue.
If an author is not motivated to fulfill this minimum quality level, for example he doesn't put a source into the article, he has made a mistake and it makes no sense to blame Wikinews. What will happen if an author submits the described basic article but it is deleted by the Wikipedia admins with the comment “spam/advertisment”? It's an interesting question. I'm not sure what happens then, in terms of a computer game i would guess this is a walkthrough, that means the player has won. He has earned a virtual reputation count, called lulz.
And if Wikinews doesn't delete such article and the article will enter into the review queue? In this example, the player has also won the game because he has submitted a fresh article to the most innovative social network available.