[Wikinews-l] request/suggest: urgent modification to wikinews page template

Fri Apr 8 04:12:17 UTC 2005

Hi,

I've just joined this list, sorry I don't know what discussion there may have
been, or any protocols I should observe.

I have an urgent request/suggestion. We need to point out more clearly that
content is user-written, and may change.

This is urgent to me personally because I have a source who is skeptical of
providing quotes because they may be edited to misconstrue the position of the
source.

This is valid, and will reduce our access to live sources.

And we have an ethical and usability issue to deal with. Ethical, I will not
even argue, I think it is obvious.

Users who do not understand the multi-user, realtime contribution nature of the
site may have trouble adjusting as they find their work amended. Forewarned,
their expectations would be more in line with their experiences, and less
problems arise.

And there are legal issues I suppose as well, if the case occured that my
potential source is afraid of. I notice that even our disclaimers page is
blank, but in reality it is not going to be effective to have this info hidden
away on the disclaimer page (although I will try to find some time to put some
disclaimer).

So what I would ask is that we amend the line "From Wikinews, the free news
source (BETA)" which appears on every page to something similar to

>From Wikinews, the free, user-written news source that
[[Wikinews:Wikinews_needs_you%21|anyone can edit]] (BETA)
<BR>Warning: content changes in realtime - refresh
[[Special:Recentchanges|recent changes]] tracker to see latest amendments

OK, that is a bit long, the first line is the important part.

Can someone please make a change like this asap, then perhaps we can come up
with better text after some discussion. I would like to be able to assure my
source that readers cannot misconstrue our content as authoritative.

Simeon