Biocrawler:In the news section on the Main Page

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

The In the news section on the Main Page has several purposes, all of which (we hope) support the central purpose of Biocrawler--making a great encyclopedia. The section mentions and links to entries of timely interest that are (and this is crucial) nonetheless encyclopedia articles that have been updated to reflect an important current event - not news items. Please follow the guidelines before updating the 'In the news' section on the Main Page.

Biocrawler is not an online newspaper, but many Biocrawlerns are motivated to create and edit entries of timely interest, and because Biocrawler is an online encyclopedia, it does a much better job with entries of timely interest (or recent events of historical importance) than a "dead tree" encyclopedia.

Non-Administrators can suggest items or changes to this section by editing the candidates page, from which administrators will update the live template from time to time.

Current version of this section on the Main Page:

view - talk - page history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:In_the_news&action=history) - related changes - Edit (admins only) (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:In_the_news&action=edit) - Suggestions by non-admins

Criteria for adding entries

The In the news section should have 3-5 recent entries that are linked from the Current events timeline and have been updated to reflect the important new event. Any change made to Template:In the news immediately updates the 'In the news' section on the Main Page. See above for the current listing. Criteria for listing on the Main Page:

1. A story should be listed on the current events page (except for the rare sports story which makes it to the main page, which should instead be listed on current sports events).
2. The current event needs to be important enough to warrant updating the corresponding article.
3. It should ideally be a story of an international importance, or at least interest.
4. The article must be updated to reflect the new information and have a recent date linked (but remember: Biocrawler is not a news report so relatively small news items should not be put into articles; thus those type of news items should not be displayed on the Main Page).
5. A short headline should be written for the current event and the article that was updated based on the current event should be bolded.
6. One and only one image should be included on Template:In the news at any one time. It should be no more than 100 pixels wide, be right justified, and have alt text. This can be done by enclosing the image code in <div style="float:right"> </div> and adding |100px| followed by the alt text inside the image code, for example: <div style="float:right">[[Image:example-photo.jpeg|100px|This is an example]]</div>. The use of the "|right" extended image markup should be avoided, since under the current MediaWiki parser it results in unsightly and unsymmetrical white borders around images on the coloured Main Page sections. When adding an image of a person, be sure to add "(pictured right)" to the news entry for clarity.

(Currently under discussion - please see Biocrawler talk:In the news section on the Main Page for details):

• The story must be well substantiated and covered by major media outlets such as broadcast media, major newspapers and magazines (i.e. no fringe sources, unsubstantiated blog entries etc). Stories should be findable on at least two major English-language sources through a contemporaneous Google News search.

(A historical note: the section began with the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack entries put up within minutes of the attacks. The entries led to a massive infusion of interest in the project.)