User talk:Brian McNeil

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Revision as of 17:39, 7 June 2016 by Brian McNeil (talk | contribs) (→‎Syrian hospital bombing: cm)

Latest comment: 8 years ago by Brian McNeil in topic Syrian hospital bombing
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Those who follow orders to commit such crimes will be found and they will be punished. War crimes will be prosecuted. And it will be no excuse to say, 'I was just following orders.' Any official involved in such crimes will forfeit hope of amnesty or leniency with respect to past action.
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Wikinewsie e-mail

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

My password appears to have stopped working for my Wikinewsie e-mail account. Is there currently a problem with the server or was it reset somehow? --William S. Saturn (talk) 19:47, 9 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

The issue has been resolved. --William S. Saturn (talk) 06:51, 12 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Recent pings?

Latest comment: 8 years ago16 comments5 people in discussion

Wondering if my recent pings have gotten through. --Pi zero (talk) 21:06, 21 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Email access has, for me, been intermittent. Still using my non-wikinewsie for most things. Few points to note/clarify:
  • Could do with someone else, more-regularly active, who could be trusted to push updates to Facebook.
  • No luck getting the hosting company to admit their cock-up on the lost database(s); will need to recreate the wikinewsie.org and editors. sites again.
  • wikinewsie.org domain has about 30 days left until renewal is due. I'm going to be struggling on that (and am struggling on the hosting at the moment).
  • For latter points, it's donate at wikinewsie.org which funds would need deposited in.
  • Seems to me looking for another admin or two might be in order. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:53, 31 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
    <waves hand> - Amgine | t 16:43, 31 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Can I become an admin? I often hang around till a review is successful and then tweet it.
acagastya 18:03, 31 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Re "For latter points, it's donate at wikinewsie.org which funds would need deposited in. ", how? Is this a PayPal address? I'd throw a fair bit there (through a friend who has a PayPal, if that's what we are using.) Gryllida 02:19, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Talking about the twitter handle or facebook page.
acagastya 04:42, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I don't see anything on the fb or twitter pages; maybe I'd need to log in? (Which of course I can't on fb. I could get a twitter account if I have to.) --Pi zero (talk) 10:53, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Svetlana has been added to the Wikinews page on Facebook as an editor. To add others, with the same right to push articles, I'll need to know they've liked the page on FB and what email they've registered there with. Twitter? I've no idea who has the 'keys' to that account.
Once I get round to rebuilding the wikinewsie.org site, I can possibly pull together a simple WordPress plugin to push articles to Facebook. In the meantime, I've just pushed the Barrier Reef article; there's an issue there in that the image on it is so small Facebook didn't choose to use it. Just going to schedule the most-recently published article to go out in a couple of hours. --Brian McNeil / talk 11:22, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's good to hear, though it still leaves me without an evident way to donate. :-S 

Btw, in fact acagastya has requested the mop and bucket on-wiki. --Pi zero (talk) 11:39, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

┌───────────────────────┘
 Annoyingly enough, donations via the button on the wikinewsie.org site were 'taxed' by Paypal. The donate button may-well have allowed a transfer without actually registering, but they now require you create an account even if you use it for nothing else.

I noted the Mop and Bucket request, will respond on that in due course; got a load to get done this afternoon. --Brian McNeil / talk 13:46, 1 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

PayPal is known to lock accounts of users without a good reason.
If you don't want to give me your bank details then I can send you over PayPal this weekend. --Gryllida 03:42, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
*I* was referring to the server sysadmining, not en.WN. I have far too much drahma happening to be able to get active with en.WN for the nonce. Side note: deposit routing numbers allow deposits, but not withdrawals; talk to your bank if you don't believe me. - Amgine | t 04:46, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Syrian hospital bombing

Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hello, Brian, Dave Blackall here. I have been trying to get the Syrian hospital bombing story published, which you did some work on earlier, and I have changed it a lot as there are new developments and much of the mainstream news centers around propaganda, which I am trying to correct and highlight in this story. I know I am trying to do too much in a news story, but it would be great to get some truth out about George Soros' White Helmets. So it is a very important story but is difficult to get it into shape. Would you be able to take a look at it, please? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nudge (talk • contribs)

I've taken a stab at copyediting the article. It was jumping all over the place, which makes it well-nigh impossible for readers to in any way timeline events. As noted in the last review on it, the WSJ source will have to go; it's paywalled, thus can't be used on Wikinews. If a syndicated, freely accessible, duplicate can be found that could be used instead. However, the biggest concern is the number of sources; usual question applies: "Are they all really needed?" If it's triangulating details from independent sources, then trimming to the minimum needed to cover all details and providing the supplementary sources on the talk page will greatly speed reviewing. An additional point to speed reviewing is the use of HTML comments (which look like <!-- see BBC for death toll -->) within the article's body can further speed the fact-check aspect of the article. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:01, 3 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Nudge: Published with some revisions, as I imagine you'll have noticed. I'm impressed you were able to find time to continually improve it (having an academic background so I've some notion just how busy you'd be atm). A tricky story, with plenty of twists and fog-of-war to complicate the synthesis. --Pi zero (talk) 16:59, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
I hear one of the shares of this on facebook went with a comment starting "didn't see this on the main stream news". Moments like that are worth savoring (or savouring, to taste). --Pi zero (talk) 17:23, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
Was shared/reposted on Facebook with the comment: "Didn't see this on the main stream news, if it was in England or even Europe people would be screaming for war ...". The artcle has reached just shy of 4,000 people via Facebook; that's very good given it didn't get posted with an image.
From a little trial-and-error over Facebook posting, seems we need images to be around 260px (at least not as small as 240px) before they'll be picked up with posted on Facebook. If Facebook has managed to spider the article already &mdash which, I believe, it likely does off our syndication feed(s) — then there's a special developers' page the link needs pushed through. There's quite a list of complaints about the OpenGraph data for all our articles; since I now see the Wikipedia FB page being used to post, I suspect the OG data will start to improve. --Brian McNeil / talk 17:39, 7 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
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