I am an American Wikipedia administrator living in Japan. Recently, as you may have seen on the news (but not Wikinews), Japan got a new prime minister. I watched his press conference and decided to grace Wikinews with this breaking story within minutes after it happened. The review process might delay it a few hours, but as it was 4AM EST, I figured Wikinews would probably still scoop Reuters and the AP.
Five hours later (hmm, 9AM EST...), a reviewer finally looked at my article and failed me on one count: THE FACT THAT THE EVENT TOOK PLACE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. No joke. He informed me that because the people at the press conference were not speaking English, and the reporting on the article was not in English, it was likely the article would not pass anyone's review. I asked for clarification on this astounding statement, requested another review for the article, and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. No changes were suggested to the article. Nobody questioned the article's writing quality or accuracy. It was simply ignored by every single reviewer on Wikinews. Four days later, the article was junked, because it was "no longer news". That's right: when I asked Wikinews to explain their policy of denying all articles that had not been reported on in English, they shut me out of their review system, with utter silence on the discussion page, until my article was safely past an arbitrary expiration date. Naturally, I was pissed, because I put a good hour of work into the article. I bothered the reviewers with new intensity, and finally they told me that if I were to remove all the Japanese sources from the article, it WOULD have been able to pass four days ago, but of course their silent treatment had its intended effect of preventing this from happening at all, so as far as Wikinews is concerned Japan has no new prime minister and never will. What did we learn from this? Wikinews does not permit articles about non-Western events. If you attempt to submit such an article, even if the event is obviously newsworthy, you will be ignored until your submission is old enough that it is no longer news. This is how they deal with "problem" articles. In other words: DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING FOR WIKINEWS. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME. Of course, their front page doesn't say anything so blatant-- you have to dig into the policies to find this statement. But what a Goddamn waste of bandwidth! I certainly won't be donating to Wikimedia as long as they are hosting such wastes of time like this. The whole, Kafkaesque discussion can be found here: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Talk:Yoshihiko_Noda_appointed_Prime_Minister_of_Japan Shii _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
