May 10, 2019

Creating a Wikinews article step by step


Admitted, i have absolutely no idea how to do the task. This qualifies me to explain the overall procedure because I'm motivated to investigate the process and provide what I've learned. The first thing what is important to know is what the Wikinews admins are doing in the worst case. In the worst-case the newly created article gets deleted. This can be done with speedy deletion, with a deletion request or without any template adhoc.
I haven't tried so by my own but according to the lastchanges logfile, it has happen around 4 times a day, that articles get deleted. The problem is, that if the page is gone it can't verified how a not-wanted page was looking like, so it is a good idea to visit the lastchanges pages quite often to identify before the admins will notice the new page what exactly was written on.
The good news is, that inside WIkinews a help page is available which gives a hint what for Wikinews a reliable source is:
Most weblinks are broken or dead, the only source which seems to be valid is
This website is well known and it aggregates all the mainstream newspapers in the world. What is not indexed by Google news are private blogs and youtube videos, so the assumption is, that both are not a source for wikinews.
Let us start with the writing itself. Creating a wikinews article is similar to posting something into a Google+ group. We need a URL, a title and a description. The URL is provided by Google news. We found in the directory a reliable URL:
in which it is explained what the most important programming languages for Robotics are in 2019. The title is created by our own: Five programming languages for learning robotics
And a small abstract for the article is needed to.
The overall post contains of: Title, URL, abstract
This is converted into the mediawiki syntax and posted to WIkinews. In theory, this is fully news article which is valid for WIkinews.
The only problem is, that i have no idea if the admin will come to the same conclusion or if they will delete the article. The problem is to anticipating the other sides behavior in advance. That means before the article is submitted. Is one URL enough, or needs the story a backup URL from a different newspaper?
A second URL would be
Similar to the first source it is explained that Python is ranked very high in the index. The URL was identified similar to the first one with Google news. Our modified WIkinews draft contains of:
title, URL1, URL2, abstract
At a certain point the article is ready for submission. It is unclear what exactly the entry barrier is. The only option to figure it out is to take a look into the deletion discussion to get an impression what the most common mistakes in Wikinews are. What we need is a list of rejected and accepted news articles to explain the difference.
The good news is that Google news is very advanced in technical terms. under the URL
A RSS newsfeed is provided. This feed can converted with a simple script into the markdown / Mediawiki syntax and this allow to autopost the latest news stories to wikinews. Instead of manually creating a single article we can create 100 articles in batch mode and hope that the WIkinews admins are like the headlines very much.