Talk:News

How to make news/ articles

Default "template"

{{newsdate|YYYYMMDD|Day, Month DD, YYYY}}

=== H3 header ===
Concise news about City of Heroes and Paragon Wiki. Include links to related wiki articles.
* [[related links]]

=== H3 header 2 ===
concise news blah blah

[[Category: News]]

News article

Move the </onlyinclude> tag as more news is archived.

== News headlines ==

<!-- Only the five latest headlines should be displayed on the [[Main Page]], so make sure only these five are inside the <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> -->

<onlyinclude>
{{:News/20090108}}
{{:News/20090107}}
{{:News/20090106}}


=== Archived News ===
* [[News/20081217| Mac Open Beta / Paragonwiki.com Domain Name]] <small>December 17, 2008</small>
* [[News/20081215| Winter Event]] <small>December 15, 2008</small>
* [[News/20081202| Issue 13 Release Date]] <small> December 01, 2008</small>
</onlyinclude>
* [[News/20081105| Issue 13 Open Beta]] <small>November 11, 2008</small>
* [[News/20081030| Coming to a Mac Near You!]] <small>October 30, 2008</small>
* [[News/20081018| Halloween event on now!]] <small>October 18, 2008</small>

* [[News/20081009| Watch Pages]] <small>October 9, 2008</small>

See Also

• News
• {{newsdate|YYYYMMDD|Day, Month DD, YYYY}}

News Category on Main Page

As Sigil has pointed out, the News category is showing up on the main page. I guess I've never really given that much thought, but since it appears that all of the news articles all the way back to October 2005 are categorized without noinclude tags, so I guess it's always been like this. Seems this would be a good thing to send a bot after. --Eabrace 00:10, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Fixed! No bot was necessary, DPL saves the day once again. -- Sekoia 01:36, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Idle Pondering

I was just idly wondering if maybe the News page should also be protected? Since it is a prominent feature of the main page, it could prove to be a good source of vandalism. I suppose, there probably isn't a reason to do this since it hasn't been an issue, but the Main Page itself is protected even though there hasn't been much in the way of vandalism to that in my recollection. Again, just idle pondering, more to explore our policy on the issue then to push for an application here. OH! And if News was protected would that have any impact on the sub-pages? —  Talk · Cont 09:31, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

There's no need for anyone, even admins, to edit the Main Page on a routine basis. It does not directly contain any content; instead, it's just layout and structure. It's the highest profile page on the site. It's also the entry point for many/most visitors. Its protection isn't just for vandalism, it's also for well-intentioned mistakes. Messing up the Main Page means all of our visitors might see the screw up until someone else fixes it. Since there's no need for anyone to edit it and since a small mistake there could impact a huge percentage of our users, it makes sense to protect it just for sanity's sake.

News, however, is edited on a routine basis. Unlike the Main Page, News contains content, and that content is updated on a very frequent basis. If we were to protect it, then only admins could update it, and that would be a very bad idea IMO. If someone does some snooping, they'd realize it'd be a good target for vandalism, but as you said, that hasn't really been an issue. It's also less likely for a mistake to accidentally screw the page up (simply because fewer people are going to end up on the page, plus its structure isn't nearly as complicated as the Main Page). So there's really no need to protect the page, and protecting it would be very harmful since it would drastically reduce the pool of who can edit the news.

Besides, unless we plan to protect each individual news article as well as everything else that transcludes (directly or indirectly) to the Main Page, I don't think there'd be a point in protecting News for vandalism's sake. If a vandal can figure out that News will affect the Main Page, they can certainly hunt out the other pages that transclude there. (To answer your question: protecting News won't protect the subpages. We'd have to protect each subpage individually.)

Going back to the Main Page, if it actually contained any content I would push to unprotect it again. We so rarely get vandalized that I don't see that as a good argument to permanently protect any content article unless it has clearly been demonstrated that the article is a target for long-term, sustained vandalism. If someone vandalizes a page once or twice, we should simply revert the vandalism. If a page is targeted several times in a short period, we should maybe put a short-term protection on it (a month or something). But permanent protection is just too extreme unless there's really a pressing need since that means only admins can ever edit it. -- Sekoia 13:06, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response. All of that makes a lot of sense. As I said, it was just idle musing, and curiosity regarding our policy and when/how/why it would go into effect. —  Talk · Cont 18:29, 8 August 2012 (UTC)