Re: Vocabulary for Article

On Mon, 6 Aug 2018 at 04:13, Michael Andrews <nextcontent01@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't see anything in the definition of Article to suggest an article
> must be 'objective'. Entire magazines are composed of commentary, which is
> perfectly fine. Article covers all types, not just 'news'.  Even the
> definition of NewsArticle allows interpretative content.
>

Indeed. Generally that is is tricky territory for a project such as ours to
venture into.

I'm a little concerned that nobody(*) has yet pointed out the work we did
over the last year or so, integrating concepts from the Trust Project into
Schema.org (and included in release notes, candidate release proposals
etc.). For the previous 5 years or so our definition of "NewsArticle" was
simply the vague sentence "A News Article", and it was used heavily across
many news-oriented sites. The interesting thing with the Trust Project work
is that it had a more ambitious, imperative tone (that came out of
newsroom-oriented collaboration) than was not directly appropriate for a
markup language like ours, so the process of adapting Schema.org to add
expressivity around NewsArticle was not simple - and involved some
"translation" into the style needed for a widely used markup. The design
you can find in pending.schema.org currently addresses this by adding
subtypes below NewsArticle for OpinionNewsArticle, ReportageNewsArticle and
others, reflecting some of the distinctions articulated within the Trust
Project. This allows a site to declare whether it considers a (news)article
to be opinion-based or straight reporting. It doesn't provide a technical
formula for evaluating whether that distinction was properly applied, of
course. People naturally disagree on that point, and our markup has to
reflect that complexity.

Although we do now (via the newsarticle subtypes) touch cautiously on this
area, I don't think we necessarily want to go across the entire set of
CreativeWork types and add anything amounting to an
"opinion-vs-straight-facts" boolean. It's complicated enough even within
the relatively constrained world of news and journalism...

Dan

p.s. as I wrote this, Vicki's mail arrived :)



> On Mon, Aug 6, 2018, 4:14 PM Niels <nielsl@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>>
>> That is a goid question Laura. Wikipedia, and its predicesser nunpedia,
>> are a very special sort of project, aiming to be a collection of entries by
>> anyone who has sonething useful to add. Such thing already has a name. A
>> wiki. I think it may very well be debated is a wiki page should be seen as
>> an article. I personally dont think a wiki page is a type article.
>>
>> A normal encyclopidia has a publisher and a (number of) author(s). Such
>> os much closer to an article.
>>
>>
>> Hans Polak points out a newsarticle should not be confused with an
>> opinated article. News is unopiniated, objective. I agree with him. The
>> issue is not with calling such work an article, the issue is with the word
>> news, which is these days used for pretty much anything.
>>
>> An article telling us that the cat whom has been stuck in a tree has
>> finally been resqued is news. It tells us something new, something we did
>> not know yet, as its main intent.
>> An article explaining how high cats can climb and from what hight they
>> can usually jump, is not news, but is backgroud.
>> An article telling us that the cat was stupid to climb in such a high
>> tree is not news, but is an opiniated article.
>>
>> This is all quite obvious, but some news agencies seem to ignor these
>> distinctions, likely because news sells, and it sells better than bacground
>> stories or opinions. Calling it news sells better.
>> But dont let that push you away from the fact that news articles are
>> objective in nature, and for now you can mark up encyclopedia entries as
>> newsarticle to imply objective information.
>>
>>
>> "The fact that some newspapers taint their news coverage with their
>> political preferences is lamentable, but they're not per definition
>> subjective."
>> They are not subjective,but they are opiniated. They are not simply
>> factual reporting of events. A distinction between an objective report and
>> an opiniated article should be made clear by the publisher. The vocab
>> should at least accomodate the posibility of making that distinction.
>>
>> I hope the vocab can be extended to make a seperate type available for
>> wiki's.
>>
>> As for the word news being abused, that is a debate society is finally
>> about to have, now that the term fake news has come about. We will probably
>> start seeing news agencies reinventing the name of the articles they sell
>> to distinct themselfs from less objective compeditors. This is an issue
>> much bigger than just the schema.org vocab.
>>
>> What we could do in schema.org is adjust the description of news
>> article, to very clearly state that with newsarticle wemean an objective
>> reporting of news. If it is not objective, it should be marked as opiniated
>> article instead. That way it is atleast made very clear to anyone using the
>> vocab that marking opinated articles as news is faulty use of the vocab.
>>
>> Hope that helps.
>> Kind regards,
>> Niels Lancel
>>
>>
>>
>> On August 6, 2018 11:36:02 AM GMT+02:00, Hans Polak <info@polak.es>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Good morning,
>>>
>>> I'd say that (ideally) newspaper articles are objective. Opinion pieces
>>> are not newspaper articles.
>>>
>>> The fact that some newspapers taint their news coverage with their
>>> political preferences is lamentable, but they're not per definition
>>> subjective.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, adding "encyclopedic entries" to the description is
>>> an excellent idea.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Hans
>>>
>>> On 06/08/18 07:31, Laura Morales wrote:
>>>
>>> "Article" is defined as "An article, such as a news article or piece of investigative report. Newspapers and magazines have articles of many different types and this is intended to cover them all."
>>>
>>> Would this be appropriate to identify articles such as encyclopedic entries? For example a Wikipedia article? The current definition seems to suggest that an article is some kind of work with a subjective point of view, for example a newspaper or magazine article. What can I use instead to identify an article which is objective and does not contain personal opinions, for example an encyclopedia's article?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>