Should VGC Have User Submitted News Articles?

[Frogger]

Machina said:

Yeah my concern is along similar lines to Ka-pi. The theory behind user-submitted news is fine, it's the editing that will be the major hurdle. 

- The key difference between a user submitted news piece that'd be suitable for the main page and between the usual forum news posts is that the former needs to be written up by the writer in their own words so that it's not plagiarised, they need to add images, a banner, do a rudimentary spellcheck, and conform to some basic guidelines (how to source, how to properly link to Tweets, italicise games, etc.). Honestly, it's more involved and time consuming than non-writing staff realise. When you post a story on the forums you can literally copy/paste and leave a link to the source at the end. Much easier, much faster; it's one key reason the forums are quicker with the news.

- Editing is quite time consuming, at least if done properly, and good editors are hard to come by. At present it's just me. Some writers can self-publish (Will, Tyler, Nick) but you'll notice that their output is inevitably not as polished. That's not a slight against them - they do good enough jobs for me to allow them to self-publish and their first drafts are better quality than any of the others for the most part - it's just a fact that if written work isn't checked over by someone else then it will likely include more errors. If we adopted this idea we'd probably have a very small team of people that are capable of editing, and so you encounter the same problem whereby stories are held up waiting for edits.

Other concerns are less important but I do have a couple:

- Is there genuine interest in this? Would we get a lot of people submitting stories? Not just in the first week but long term. We'd need to for it to be worth the time on Trucks' part setting it up.

- Would we have enough editors? When we had a proper GameDB only a handful of people bothered to work through approving others' submissions, and of these by far the most dedicated is no longer with us (oliist). And that was a much less time consuming and demanding role than editing articles. They'd need to go into the article and correct spelling mistakes, correct grammar and punctuation, make sure the source is listed in the proper format, make sure the images were crisp and not watermarked, that the banner was suitable and would fit the boxes on the front page properly, that game names were properly spelt out and italicised, that the story's name was properly capitalised and accurate, etc. There are guidelines for all of this but existing writers often fail on a couple or more of these points each time, which is why we have an editor system for staff. When dealing with content produced by regular users it'd be an even bigger job than normal in editing terms.

To the first point, I understand all of that. What I'm proposing is that anyone submitting a news article to the site be equipped with guidelines fully detailing just how these news articles must be done, with the warning that no articles that fail to adhere to these guidelines would be selected. I'm not suggesting that users copy-paste news articles and submit that. I'm suggesting that more passionate users would go to this terminal, submit a news article that adheres to the guidelines, and then have these editors sort through that. I'm definitely not trying to imply that writing a news article doesn't take time and effort, I just think that it would be much easier to have news posted in a more timely manner if it were done this way. Maybe I'm just an idealist, but I have faith that, when presented with a clear set of rules and guidelines, most of the content submitted will be of a high quality.

To the point about editors, maybe editors was a poor choice of word. They are primerily curators. They are meant to be a middle-man between the users and you. Their primery job would be to select good articles in the first place. Their job is to read through the articles, select the first one of a high quality that adhere to the rules and guidelines effectively, edit that, and then submit the curated articles to you for the more rudementary edit. Again, I'm not trying to say that anyone isn't doing their job correctly, but I understand why the writing staff can't feasibly be awake 24/7 to write an article on every single piece of breaking news as it happens when they are freelance, and I think it's clear to most of us that many of the news articles written here are done one after the other in quick succession as a means of catching up with what was missed for the day. This is just a proposition to alleviate that. The idea is that if 20 members each submit one good article as soon as it breaks, each of those articles will be posted faster than the way it's being done now and there will be less articles to make up for at the end of the day.

To the third point, that is my biggest concern. Like I said, I can only speak for myself here. My idea came from how active the Game DB was, and specifically how Trucks (this is Will, right?) said that the reason this was so successful was because users would rush to post and update game information on their favorite games/games they were interested in as soon as it came out. My thought process was pretty much the same for this. The articles submitted would therefore come from a user's want to post news about a game they're excited for or a console they have an affinity for, but as for the longevity of such a system, I don't know. I do think that it should award badges and Gamrpoints as an incentive, but again, I'm basing much of the potential success of such a system on heresay from the days of the Game DB.

And to the final point, I also don't know. I didn't really consider that the approved editors might not actually be active in doing the job they applied for, so that would obviously be an issue. The three-tier system I outlined would help alleviate some of that workload, as well as the guidelines for the writers, but I really don't have a concrete answer for that, as it would really depend on everyone doing what they're supposed to. Again, ideally the mod approved editor-curators would pick the articles they need to do the least work editing, edit that, and then submit those to you or any other "real" editors for final approval. But as for how reasonable of work that would be, I can't say.