Talk:Current events/Archive 3

An important reason to put some effort into this section is that people at the search engines will be searching on current events stories. Probably a very significant percentage of searches on Yahoo, Google, etc., on any given day, are on topics that are big at the moment. If we make an effort of adding relevent links to the Current events page, and then make an effort to create good articles for whatever that page is linking to, we will be able to get lots of traffic from the search engines. We will also establish a reputation for being a place where people can come to find information on stuff that is happening right now.

So be bold in adding new topics to Current events, and feel free to improve the organization of the page.

- Tim

Instructions for archiving this page:

Each month, we archive this by moving the page to a month page (e.g. December 2002), and then create a new "Current events" page. This has the effect of archiving the "Older versions" with the month, and giving us a fresh history every month (and keeps the log of older versions managably small)

Procedure in a nutshell:

move this page to "month year" of last month
edit this page to copy the header text (and any events from this month)
go back to "Current events"
edit it to remove the redirect & paste the header text

(feel free to refine these instructions - RobLa 07:13 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC))

Do we really need this ? This is an encyclopedia not a tabloid after all. The point about search engine search is questionable. It would be best to put some porn to attract audience to Wikipedia. Huh ?
-- Kpjas

One great advantage Wikipedia might have over other encyclopedias is our ability to have timely articles. I think it is good strategy to focus efforts in those areas where we might have a competitive advantage. - Tim

Are we keeping them ? News become obsolete so quickly.
Besides, it is IMO pointless to make empty links to news items !!!
-- Kpjas

The links to articles we don't have are there for two reasons. 1) People can add links to current events without having to know in advance whether we have an article. 2) People are encouraged to create articles for subjects we don't have, for the reasons stated on the main page.

And of course we are keeping the articles. I can't imagine why we wouldn't. What would be an example of a current events article that would not be worth keeping? - Tim

Interest fades, importance diminishes ...

Omaha beach took a tragic toll of lives. Do we think it proper to include the

names in an encyclopedia?

Encyclopedia is encyclopedia. There is even a page devoted to pointing out

what wikipedia is not. Another one - it is not 'News of the World' like

tabloid. Would you include rumours in an encyclopedia ???

If someone thinks that some current event is worth making a link to it, he/she

should write the article instead. Waiting for someone else to pick it up

can eventually result in empty links to obsolete news items.
--Kpjas

Kpjas, there are many important topics that become important (sometimes, only temporarily) because of their prominence as part of current events. This doesn't mean that we need to develop news articles, per se. I hope we don't try to do that. Instead, we should develop encyclopedia articles--that, sometimes, actually concern breaking (i.e., newly developing) news. Again, we aren't trying to write news articles, here, but background articles necessary for a good understanding of the news.

The suggestion that, in offering encyclopedia articles about topics that have become important due to their importance in current events, Wikipedia is (or wants to be like) a tabloid, is absurd. --LMS

and, of course, the new and exciting 'holiday' category can be changed seasonally! --MichaelTinkler, who was in a former life COMPELLED to create seasonally-changing bulletin boards.

I'm a believer in this page now. I checked it today and saw the link to the Leonids, which are coming up this weekend. Yay! <>< tbc

Y'know, if there were one or two other people working on this page daily, I would work on it daily too (or so I predict). What do you think? It's just not nearly as useful if it isn't updated daily. --LMS

We should probably give up on daily updates. My latest idea on keeping current events maximally useful given the present personnel is to generate lists of links relevant to Yahoo's list of Full Coverage topics. If anyone's game, this would be a great service... --LMS

If there'd be a way to get just the big topics from some website automatically each day and append them to the current events as topics, it might motivate prople to write about such topics. --Magnus Manske

I'd tend to agree with Magnus - maintaining a page such as this manually is crazy, and will inevitably lead to some events being ommitted (as the Gaza City bombing of July 22 2002 was omitted)

Chuck Heston may indeed be "chairman of the National Rifle Association" (here I reproduce the text I deleted in the interests of fairness), but that is not how most people will know him.

Hm. Anybody who watches the news in the US will be very familiar with the fact of Heston's association with the NRA. --mav

I'm not a fan of the NRA and am not likely to advertise it, but I agree with mav. When I hear "Charleton Heston", I think of the NRA before I think of Moses or apes. — Toby 04:39 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

"These entries should be edited with an eye to historicity..." (My italics)

Does this mean "factual accuracy", "put into correct historical perspective", "put here only if it looks like it will become history", or what? What is the ideal relationship between the Current events page and history?

--Ryguasu

The OED's only definition of "historicity" is about having to do with history as opposed to fiction or legend. (For example, the question "What is the historicity of the Gospel of John?" asks whether the events that John describes actually occured, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate the book may be with respect to its theological points.) It seems doubtful that this is what we really mean to say. — Toby 04:33 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Is the 45^th anniversary of an event an event of its own? Personally I don't think it is. -- JeLuF

I agree. I've removed it. Anniversaries are on the date pages, such as October 4. Unless anyone objects, I'll add something on this to the Wikipedia:Current events article development page. -- Tarquin 19:32 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Are we really going to list by name every person killed in the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine? Or just the Palestinians? Should we compile a list of all the Jewish children who were killed at birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, and pizza parlors? -- Zoe

Last day listed is 7 October. Should something be 8 October?

---Iraq inspectors...I thought they were only in Cyprus...not Iraq? Lir 11:46 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

We heard reports this morning that the tanker Prestige had been towed from Spanish waters to Portuguese waters before it broke up. The Portuguese authorities had refused to allow it to dock. Does anyone know what all this was about? Why would they tow it into another countries waters? Is this legal? Is it legal for the authorities to refuse permission to dock? -- Chris Q 10:13 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

It appeared it was not clear at first whether it was initially in portuguese waters or spanish ones. Arsenio Fernandez de Mesa said it was in portuguese, hence it was maybe towed to portugal. But, then it appeared it was in reality in spanish. Look at the route here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2487739.stm

Football: Real Madrid has defeated Olimpia to win the Intercontinental Cup or the World Club Cup or the European-South America Cup or the Toyota Cup, or something.

Can someone nail this down? -- Zoe, who knows nothing about "football".

Would someone please review my entry on Henry Kissinger for NPOV? I was trying to cite claims made by others, not necessarily myself. -- Zoe

Fair, but I think people are defining "war criminal" too broadly. --GABaker

Let's see. People are in the country illegally. They're arrested for violating United States immigrations laws. And now they claim they're being harrassed? Perhaps if they weren't here illegally ... -- Zoe

Here is what the Washington Post article says concerning the use of beatings against terrorism suspects:

"According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance."

In another paragraph, the article says that "our guys may kick them around a little bit". soulpatch

But the word "beatings" is in a sentence right after another sentence talking about interrogations. So one gets the false impression that "beatings" are being used directly by US personnel during interrogations. The article did not say this. --mav

Okay, so change the order of the sentences, but don't eliminate the fact that beatings took place as a prelude to interrogation as a means of breaking their resistance, and thus it was part of the overall interrogation strategy. At least we are now in agreement that the article does say that the United States was engaging in beatings as part of its treatment of the prisoners. soulpatch

Cyclone Zoe? I swear, I haven't been anywhere near the Solomon Islands. ;-) -- Zoe

You've just been tearing through bad articles and fixing them like an powerful force of nature in Recent Changes. :-) --mav

If there's a Cyclone blowing in Wikipedia that's not Zoe :) Ericd

January 3, 2003 is the eleventy-first anniversary of the birth of J.R.R.Tolkien. Not of earthshaking significance, perhaps, but how many eleventy-first anniversaries does a man have? --- Someone else 21:39 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)

It seems we should be archiving this by moving the page to December 2002 (thus moving the history), and then creating a "new" Current events page. That way, we start with a fresh "history" every month. The current history log is pretty full. Thoughts? - RobLa 06:22 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

Seems like a good idea. Maybe we should write up the procedure at the top of this talk page. -- Tarquin 10:46 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC) --

edit this page to copy the header text
move this page to "month year"
go back to "Current events"
edit it to remove the redirect & paste the header text

Done. - RobLa 07:13 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

A very long history is not a good reason for this. We simply need a better way to display history that is similar to Recent Changes instead of displaying possibly thousands of versions all at once. I moved the history back because of this and due to the fact that the page count follows the history. See Talk:December 2002. --mav

Trimmed from Iraq:

(a more or less direct quote from a Reuters article: removed)

There should be an article on the recent INS "special registrations" required by the Bush administration for Middle Eastern and North Korean males age 16 and over. Any thoughts on a good title? INS Special Registrations, maybe?

I was laying in bed thinking about getting up and heard the boom, noticed the windows rattle and knew something unusual had happened. I noted the time, turned on the TV and about 10 minutes the later the news started pouring in from all the networks about the space shuttle. Very tragic. B

Re UK's Iraq dossier. They presented the document as the latest British intelligence, and it turns out they copied it without permission from a 12-year-old thesis by a Californian student. The thing wasn't what they said it was, by a long chalk. They misrepresented it in a scandalous way. It was fraud. I am restoring the word "fraud". --GrahamN 19:32 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

[remark by Mintguy] (the word FRAUD implies deliberate deception, it is too POV.)

It was certainly a deception. If it wasn't deliberate, the implication is that they have no idea what they are doing. I suppose this may well be the case. I'll split the difference, with "plagiarism". --GrahamN 19:50 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Well as Downing street's advocate for the moment, they say that they never claimed exclusive authorship of the information contained within it. They claim that the information itself is accurate, if this is true then there is no fraud as such. "Plagiarism" is much better. Nice one. :) Mintguy

Hang on you put word-for-word bak. The examples I've seen were not word-for-word in more than a few phrases. See -http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2736149.stm - The wording has been changed. Mintguy

OK. GrahamN 20:21 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Hold on...

"These shifting appointments are part of Saddam's policy of balancing security positions" (UK gov't dossier)

"These shifting appointments are part of Saddam's policy of balancing security positions" (Thesis by Ibrahim al-Marashi)

I think I'll say "in parts word-for-word". GrahamN