User:WaltCip/DICE standard

Purpose

The Wikipedia:In the news significance criteria currently states that the following principles are useful for assessing consensus:

• The length and depth of coverage itself
• The number of unique articles about the topic
• The frequency of updates about the topic
• The types of news sources reporting the story

In my opinion, these principles would be excellent in determining whether a story is worth posting. However, in practice, we rarely see consistent adherence to these principles leading to the unfortunate outcome that consensus is usually based on a head count. Indeed, the threshold for "length and depth of coverage" could be narrow for some users (like myself) and wide for others. It's clear that demolishing the significance standard outright would not be workable either, for it risks creating the perception that WP:ITN is a news ticker. Yet at the same time, the current standard is contentious and the divides between users are deep and in some cases irreconcilable.

This thread seeks to workshop the idea of what a less contentious, less subjective criterion would look like. There is no point in attempting to prescribe a change to our procedures or guidelines as to what kind of items we should be posting to ITN, because there would never be any consensus to achieve this. Instead, the goal should be to find a common ground on rewording the current standard so as to reorient users towards a less adversarial approach to ITN/C.

Background

Let’s look at the things that presumed notable items do have in common, and those things that presumed non-notable items have in common. Note that all of these would have reliable source coverage:

• Examples of notable items: National elections, national or international sporting events with large viewership, disasters that affect lots of people, first rocket launches for a nation, wars, assassinations of a major political figure.

• Examples of non-notable items: Celebrity gossip, subnational elections, political intrigue, athletic records.

• Examples of grey area items: Lawsuits between two major companies, business mergers, archeological or scientific discoveries, United Nations directives, moderate disasters in areas that are known for disasters.

By categorizing these items, we can see the following commonalities:

• Notable items impact large amounts of people on a wide scale, whether it’s the population of a country or the whole world. They do not necessarily have to be injured or killed in order for this to happen, nor does there necessarily need to be international crossover, but it is an item that grabs public attention and may impact daily life in a significant way for those concerned

• Non-notable items are usually ignored because they don’t affect as many people. Or if they do affect people, the impact is not very tangible and at times the news coverage outsizes the actual notability.

• The grey area items fall somewhere in the middle, in that they affect a lot of people, but the actual degree of the impact is difficult to pinpoint for those outside of that sphere. This is the area that causes the most contention at ITN.

Proposed standard (DICE)

Therefore, it seems that rather than a significance standard, we should be assessing based on an impact standard. This would not change how we operate at ITN/C, as the assessment method is still the same. However, the focus would change to determining the degree and scale as to how people are impacted. We can measure this by assessing the news coverage and answering the following questions:

• Depth: How much news coverage is this item receiving?

• Impact: How does the story define the impact on people in the region affected, if there is any?

• Consequences: For the news category this story is posted under (politics, art, science, sports, etc.), what sort of ramifications are there?

• Encyclopedic: Is this a suitable item to either update or create a standalone Wikipedia article?

Functionally, the types of items that are being posted to ITN would not change, as we are still assessing the significance of the stories, but we now have a clear standard in which we can review items as opposed to an abstract personal assessment. In making the criteria more specific and objective, we qualitatively assess based on the above criteria, by actually reviewing the news coverage and exploring the details within it. From there, we can reach a consensus around whether these criteria have been satisfied rather than based on a head count.

The other advantage to this is that as we continue to use the DICE standard, the global consensus on ITN around what items are posted becomes clearer and more definable, which will help other users who might not understand what is required in order for a newsworthy item to actually be posted. Furthermore, we can document the changes over time as consensus changes.