User talk:Nil Einne/ITN reform

Reform

What do people think about the proposal? One of my biggest concerns, as I think was monotone who originally proposed this is that we don't want it to be too loose such that every single event with a decent background article that's in the news ends up on RMA. Another concern is about the death criteria which I have highlighted below: Nil Einne (talk) 07:36, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Death criteria

The death criteria is probably the biggest challenge and remains fairly subjective. While we may be able to improve it, I don't think we can achieve anything that isn't fairly subjective (as David Levy mentioned last time). I think this is one of the reasons a number of us are reluctant to change the current criteria. While there are disputes and confusion particularly given the wording, for example with Pavarotti and Fischer, I think there has been general agreement by people who understood the criteria that neither of these deaths were what we meant by 'unexpected'. The bigger problem has been although we can generally agree on what's an unexpected death, there remains a lot of dispute when we exclude very noteable people because a lot of people simply don't agree with the criteria and feel it should be ignored.

With the new criteria and with a change in emphasis to the importance of background information this will change. The problem with the new criteria isn't so much on most of the recent cases. I don't think there would be much dispute about us mentioning Edmund Hillary, Lucianno Pavaroti, Bobby Fischer, Milton Friedman, James Brown et al. These are very noteable people and when people hear of their deaths, they may be interested in reading background information on who these people were.

The bigger problem is stuff like Galyani Vadhana. She was a princess of Thailand and sister of the current king and given Thai culture and her status, her death I think was big news in Thailand. We have a fairly decent article on her. Should her death have been mentioned? IMHO she doesn't fit the criteria but it wouldn't surprise me if we ended up with some Thais who disagreed (except we don't have many Thai people but don't let that bely the point).

What about the infamous case of Anna Nicole Smith? In the U.S. in particular (and all over the world to a lesser degree) her death attracted a lot of attention. I'm sure people were interested in reading background information. But she was as they say, famous for being famous. Did she really have a "profound influence on the culture and society"? I would say no, but I'm guessing there would be others who disagree.

While these two weren't the best examples, they do illustrate the problem. There are likely to be a lot more cases that occur where some people argue 'hey this person is an outstanding figure' and other people disagree and the risk is here is we are going to end up with a lot of 'my person is more outstanding then your person' arguments.

Nil Einne (talk) 07:31, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Portal:Current events

I noticed on WP:MfD that some of the subpages of Portal:Current events are being reformed. See Wikipedia:MfD#Current events subportals. I don't know how much this will affect the actual portal itself, and hence how it interacts with ITN (or RMA, as it will hopefully become), but thought I'd mention this here. Will try and comment on the rest later. Carcharoth (talk) 11:38, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Minimum coverage

I suggest we should have a threshold on items which are borderline notable/trivial; like for example, if it has an airtime of at least 1 minute in an English-language news channel then we might add it. If the airtime was less than 10 seconds we should not post it. For websites, it should be "featured prominently" in that website's "main page" and not on specialized sections (for example, a soccer story should appear on BBCNews.com, not BBCSport.co.uk) or merely as links on a list. If you didn't see it in the "main page" without pressing "Page Down" it is probably not important.

And if either of these borderline notable/trivial items do make it, they should have a minimum amount of time to be displayed, like two days. After two days, find a suitable replacement (either another borderline notable/trivial item, a new and better suggestion or an old item that's still news. Often times these borderline notable/trivial items notability expires after a few days, like that Indian car item, it wasn't even featured prominently on the news yet it stayed for like a week. --Howard the Duck 06:10, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Name change: ITN --> RMA ?

I am not sure if "Read more about..." is a good name. To me, every wikilink in boldface on MainPage links to a wikipage to read more about. Also, the materials presented at ITN is news-related. No matter what name/title is used, readers will associated this section on MainPage as some sort of a news-site. If we have to change the name, perhaps sth like "Recently updated..." would remind readers that only articles well updated will qualify for an appearance. That's my 2 cents for now. --PFHLai (talk) 22:40, 2 February 2008 (UTC)