From Fedora Project Wiki

Fedora Weekly News: Work Flow

Work flow for Fedora Weekly News Writers and Editors.

Writing News Beats

Due Dates

Everybody works on News Beats all week long with due date on Sunday 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Upon completion of the beat the beat author changes the status in the Beat Sections Table from "incomplete" to "COMPLETE". This provides an indication to the editorial team that there will be no further updates to the content unless the author notifies the editorial team.

Style and Formatting

You can help the editorial process quite a bit by remembering a few stylistic points in your writing:

  • FWN attempts to adhere as closely as possible to the StyleGuide. Writers should familiarize themselves with it and try to keep in mind some of these elements in your writing, such as active voice, etc.
  • It is preferred that citations and references in your work use the markup provided by MediaWiki's cite.php module. Wrap any URI, which you wish to cite, inline with an opening and closing ref tag and include a reference placeholder tag at the bottom of each item in your beat. For example see the markup and its resultant rendering below:
Sample showing markup and displayed output from use of cite.php reference markup
Markup
==== Title of Some Item in Beat ====

Here is some text and it includes a reference<ref>https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Main_Page</ref> to the main page of the Fedora Project.
It also contains another reference<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN</ref> to Fedora Weekly News itself.
<references/>
Output

Title of Some Item in Beat

Here is some text and it includes a reference[1] to the main page of the Fedora Project. It also contains another reference[2] to Fedora Weekly News itself.

  • For references to people who are members of the Fedora Project community, it is good to insert references back to their wikiname pages, with the camel case name followed by the person's name with the first and last name separated by a space, eg. JoeSmith|Joe Smith.
  • Another consistency point is what tense the writing is in. Write in the past tense, since the News is covering events that have already happened.
  • If you can make your beat more narrative and summary, this will be more readable. When reporting on long exchanges or discussions amongst many people, try to write concisely, reporting on the most salient points.

Editorial Passes (Sun - Mon)

The editorial team starts copying the contents from beats to live issue page (with editorial pass) and a goal to have a rough draft by Monday morning Eastern Time.

An editorial pass should ideally consist of editing the submissions to conform to the StyleGuide, ensuring that the link references appear to be accurate and fixing up any obvious typos or grammatical errors. Other common corrections include: ensuring that there is no space between a citation in square brackets and the preceding word, making sure the wikinames of mentioned people are correct, and making sure that the list of URL references is separated with a complete newline between each reference.

Submit the News (Mon)

There are two wiki tasks to do to get the news formatted for the next issue: 1) create a new FWN issue page for the upcoming issue 2) update the redirect so that the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue points to the new issue.

Creating a New Fedora Weekly News Page for the new issue

1. Log into the wiki with your wiki credentials

2. Navigate to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/IssueXXX where XXX is the upcoming issue number

3. Edit the new page; open a second tab in your browser to FWN/Beats and copy the source from each COMPLETED beat one after another, into the page edit you have open in the other tab for the upcoming issue; be sure to preserve the section anchors to ensure correct formatting

4. Save the page after you have copied the last beat into the new page

Editing the Redirect to Point to the New Issue

While still logged in to your Fedora Project wiki account, navigate your browser to https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=FWN/LatestIssue&redirect=no

Edit the page here to point to the new https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/IssueXXX where XXX is the upcoming issue number. Save the page.

Sending New Issue Out to fedora-announce-list

Finally, the editorial team submits the weekly news to fedora-announce-list and fedora-news-list before Monday afternoon Eastern Time. This is handled by PascalCalarco, OisinFeeley or HuzaifaSidhpurwala, whomever is available. If someone else needs to send this out who is not approved to post to the list, MaxSpevack or another list admin can approve the message to the list.

Copying the printable version of the issue from the browser into an e-mail and cleaning up some of the remaining wikilinks seems to produce clean enough output for mailing. We send out the entire contents of the issue to fedora-announce-list.

Add Link to Top of Archive Listing

Add a link to the previous week's issue at the top of FWN/Archive