User talk:HJ Mitchell/Archive I

For a faster response, try posting at w:User talk:HJ Mitchell as well as or instead of here. Thanks for stopping by. HJMitchell You rang? 14:20, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

It's great that you can come accross! It being a smaller community, Wikinews can help out a lot. While I don't expect you to try and actually contribute (unless of course you want to :p), I'll give you the standard welcome just for the useful links; Wikinews: For Wikipedians is designed as a bit of a crash course. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 22:35, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikinews

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I had a quick browse of that last time I was here. I'd like to help out but when it comes to writing articles, someone always seem to beat me to anything interesting. What else can I do to make myself useful around here? I can copyedit and review content...... HJ Mitchell Penny for your thoughts? 22:46, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

No problem! Well, if you want to help out, things like looking over articles for copyedits you can perform are always welcome, especially things in CAT:REV and the most recent articles on the Main Page. Remember WN:ARCHIVE means that after a short time no new content should be added. We have FlaggedRevs so only WN:Editors can actually review. Once you have managed to write a few articles, in compliance with the WN:style guide, then editor status is designed to be easy come, easy go. Oh, and do feel free to hang around #wikinews on Freenode, which sometimes feels like the location at which this place is run. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 23:05, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

I looked back over your contributions. You seem to have a decent idea what you're doing already, which means that you should fly along. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 23:12, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

UK Prime Minister apologises for Rochdale gaffe

Unfortunately, I had to delete the article since our reuse terms are not campatible with those used by Wikipedia and so transfer of content would be copyright infringement. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:40, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

I see we've written on each other's talk pages at the same time. The problem with that is you would also need permission from each and every individual author to dual-license their contributions. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:42, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

No problem. Thanks Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:59, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Chilean earthquakes in the O'Higgins Region: photoessay

Completed the copy edits you requested on the talk page. Cheers, C628 (talk) 19:43, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

James Pain (talk) 16:11, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Reviewer Promotion

I have promoted you to the Wikinews:Reviewer class, as I feel you can be trusted to mark revisions of articles as sighted (review). Please take a moment to read:

• Wikinews:Flagged revisions
• Wikinews:Reviewing articles
• {{Peer review}}
• {{Review}}
• Reviewed article version
• Flagged Revisions extension information, on MediaWiki

If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask for help on my talk page, and thank you for contributing to Wikinews!

Mikemoral♪♫ 03:39, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Congrats. Bawolff ☺☻ 09:19, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks guys! :) HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 09:22, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Moscow Metro attack suspects killed by police

Hi, thanks for writing such a great article! Much appreciated, and you're using the "newsy" style of writing very well. One note, it's not current practise to subst: infoboxes; it's better to transclude them so the editing window is less cluttered. Thanks and cheers. Tempodivalse [talk] 13:55, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Also, if you could use shorter paragraphs? I know on Wikipedia they can become very long, but for a news article it's better to split them once every two or three sentences, to make it easier to digest. This paragraph was getting to be uncomfortably long before I split it. Tempodivalse [talk] 13:58, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for the praise, and the advise! I have a habit of being a little on the tl;dr side. How do I log it for the writing contest (I thought I may as well have a stab!)? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:02, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Mmm. Have you added Category: HJ Mitchell (Wikinewsie), Category:Writing Contests/May 2010 to the article? If so, it should have logged automatically after being peer-reviewed by our widget. If not, then add it manually here, specifying how many points it's worth (you can check this by enabling the point counter gadget, which adds a "Character count" button to the toolbox). Then someone will come along and update the standings table. Tempodivalse [talk] 14:27, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah, done. Thanks. I'd omitted the writing contest cat (I knew there was something!) so I've logged my last 2 articles manually. Thanks for your help :) HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:04, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Minor note about reviewing articles

Hi, great work reviewing. ;) One suggestion, if you see something minor in an article that needs fixing (like more links, or some typos/bad grammar), and the rest of the story is OK, instead of failing, consider fixing the errors yourself and then publishing - it's much more efficient. Although reviewers should be "uninvolved", generally doing copyedits like that doesn't count (or even the addition of an extra sentence or two for better context). Of course, if you were adding paragraphs to the article, or had to completely rewrite it, that's a different matter. Just a thought. Cheers, Tempodivalse [talk] 16:37, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips. I'm used to reviewing good articles on WP and they tend to be slightly larger than your average WN article :). Always nice to be able to get an article on an emerging news story up quickly- good work. Btw, when I add an article to the lead templates, is there some particular method for deciding which template to add it to or should I jsut use the default that the script picks? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:11, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Generally, you update the lead that contains the oldest story, to keep everything fresh - WN:ML gives you the last time each of the leads was edited. Although, if there's an important breaking news story, you can give it prominence on a higher lead and rotate the article that's already there down a notch. Tempodivalse [talk] 17:41, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Again! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:12, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi again.

Could you take a look at #wikinews ? :) --Diego Grez ^{return fire} 22:05, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Karzai visits UK for talks with new PM

That was awfully old for publishing...sometimes it's better to just admit defeat and allow it to go stale rather than putting several-day-old stories on the Main Page...not criticizing you, it's a good article, just a thought...C628 (talk) 02:03, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

I was considerin' it, but I don't think it's too old and the story itself (Afghanistan, the new PM and all the trimmings) is still current, otherwise I would have requested its deletion. I got sucked into a timesink on WP yesterday and didn't have chance to finish it as promptly as I would have liked :). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 02:07, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

It seemed stale to me too, but technically it wasn't, by our 3 day consensus on staleness. Anyway, as C628 said, it is a good article.

If the community was a bit bigger, perhaps someone should have jumped in and finished it for you in the wiki way. However, at least for now, Wikinews doesn't really work like that. We do have the section in the newsroom for collaboration requests, and the IRC channel, where you can flag up an article that needs help. (I don't know how that affects contest scores.)

--InfantGorilla (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Re: Hint

Hi, HJ. Thanks for vouching for me at WN:AR. I do need to up my edit count here, but I have absolutely no idea where to get started -- it's rather different from en-wp. I'm in the same position you appeared to be in when you first came here: anything I find interesting has already been written about, especially as I don't have TV, so miss out on a lot of news anyway. I noticed WN:ADOPT is redlinked, but perhaps you'd be interested in adopting me here anyway? Matthewedwards (talk) 02:52, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Sure. The easiest way to get started is just to linger in the Newsroom- copyedit articles marked as ready for publishing and maybe go through some of the already published articles for copyediting/style/updates etc and if you find an interesting story on the web, write an article about it. It doesn't have to be anything fantastic, just a few thousand characters. You can also linger on the recent changes to get an idea for what's going on and offer your opinion at the water coolers (WN equivalent of the Village pump). The pace isn't as frenetic here as it is on WP but I quite like that about it! Hope that helps :) HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 11:36, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Hong Kong chief executive invites opponent to television debate

EPR failed to sight this article, so that instead of going to the main page it went to Wikinews:Newsroom#Articles mispublished. I've sighted it.

I think this problem sometimes comes up because of which browser is used when running EPR, though I'm not entirely clear on the details (you might try User talk:Bawolff). When I publish an article I always immediately check its revision history to see that it says the published version was sighted. --Pi zero (talk) 13:26, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh dear. Thanks for sorting it out, and thanks for the tip- I'll remember that for the future. I'm guessing that's what happened to my article- Times Square bomb suspects arrested in Pakistan- then. I noticed it had been published but not sighted, so i sighted it myself. Thanks again. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:34, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

OMG OMG! A HJ Mitchell!

:O! Glad to see you back editing here at Wikinews! Long time without you here. ;) Diego Grez ^{return fire} 18:38, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Glad to see you're back! We could definitely use a little bit of help with reviewing. :) Benny the mascot (talk) 20:02, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Venezuelan army on high alert after Chávez cuts diplomatic ties with Colombia

I am very concerned that you published this. Please review the style guide, review guideline, and other sundry policies before doing this again. We never publish single-source articles. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 21:10, 25 July 2010 (UTC)