Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[emijrp]

I agree with this analysis.

2011/9/13 

> English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional
> competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create
> reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good
> encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news
> were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage
> for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
>
> A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if
> you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.
> On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there
> are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if
> you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
>
> And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> text. If not today then in a year.
>
> Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an
> increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.
> If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the
> project will never lift off.
>
>
> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> the project always stays above the critical mass.
>
> Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English
> language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language
> news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I
> guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and
> hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the
> diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer
> reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and
> original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per
> village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places
> and propagate sharing.
>
> Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native
> content before.
>
> That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I
> think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At
> least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a
> difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much
> else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead
> to anything making a difference.
>
> Marcus Buck
> User:Slomox
>
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:37 PM, emijrp  wrote:

> I agree with this analysis.
>
> 2011/9/13 
>
> > English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional
> > competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create
> > reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good
> > encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news
> > were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage
> > for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
> >
> > A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if
> > you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.
> > On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there
> > are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if
> > you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
> >
> > And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> > will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> > and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> > you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> > text. If not today then in a year.
> >
> > Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an
> > increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.
> > If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the
> > project will never lift off.
> >
> >
> > It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> > paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> > the project always stays above the critical mass.
> >
> > Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English
> > language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language
> > news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I
> > guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and
> > hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the
> > diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer
> > reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and
> > original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per
> > village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places
> > and propagate sharing.
> >
> > Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native
> > content before.
> >
> > That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I
> > think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At
> > least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a
> > difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much
> > else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead
> > to anything making a difference.
> >
> > Marcus Buck
> > User:Slomox
> >
> >
> > ___
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> >
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I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing
field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won
that race.

The same point applies to Encyclopedias- Wikipedia is proof that just about
anyone can contribute to an encyclopedia, not just a published versions  by
white, old, Academicians and instead refine it, continuously to compete with
any other Encyclopedia. Now, the difference of concept between an
Encyclopedia and a News source are undeniable, you can not refine a news
article and you have to be correct and quick at the same time. The
difference is, Wikipedia already does this, breaking stories do link back
Wikipedia article from Google News. The difference between the two projects
is the number of contributors.

The concept of this movement is based mainly on volunteers. it has proven
that random volunteers from around the world can accomplish anything, if we
pay people to contribute, it goes against the ethos of all the projects.

The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
never able to capitalize on this.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24,   wrote:
> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
> the project always stays above the critical mass.

That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news
source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned
that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I
said, heresy, For his ears :P

The main difference between Wikipedia (projects with similar dynamics)
and Wikinews is necessity for maintenance. And that's -- huh.

Serbian Wikinews is driving on deal with the news agency Beta and bot
which I wrote. But, for ~10 days it doesn't have content added by bot
because formatting of Beta pages changed. I have to: (1) remember on
which server I run that bot; maybe password, as well; (2) analyze four
years old code; (3) change it; (4) but, most importantly, I have to
have free time for that. And willingness.

Now, imagine news source without that bot and with necessity to have
news between ultra important events. Five persons would be needed to
cover 24/7, not counting editor. But, let's say that we just need
those 5 persons and that editors would be people from the community.
~40 stewards, volunteers, are able to cover most important issues
24/7, mostly. And stewards are volunteers of the system which works.

Wikinews is not working and up to ~10 days ago the only useful
Wikinews -- as general source of information -- was Serbian Wikinews
and just thanks to the deal with a news agency and one bot. I tried to
do the same with English Wikinews, but, maintaining harvester from a
couple of sources is a job which uses a lot of time, on daily basis.
(Still, if anyone with Python knowledge is willing to share workload
with me to cover English [and other] Wikinews editions, I am still
willing to activate bots.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Lodewijk]

Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 :


>
> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
> never able to capitalize on this.
>
> Theo
>
>
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global
south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
but on many others we're not.

It is this potential that does matter though - but to achieve that, we
should work on it.

But more importantly - you are correct that Wikinews' user base is simply
too small. You can theoretically write an encyclopedia with 3 skilled
people, as long as you take your time and do a hell lot of research.
However, this is not true for a news source - to make that work you always
need up to date everything, you need to cover the latest news and have
interesting research. If Wikipedia stands still for a week (no edits) we can
just continue after that. If the New York Times would do the same, most
likely they have lost a lot of their readers. Continuity and masses are even
more important for Wikinews than for Wikipedia to make it work.

Therefore, I'm not so sure if forking is good per se. Wikinews was already
too small to my liking, and splitting it up might bring the community even
further below the critical mass. At the same time it might bring the
apparently needed changes for some, and make them work - I do hope though
that both communities will quickly figure out what methods work best, and
join together again to make it more likely to pass this threshold of
activity.

Lodewijk
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Tom Morris]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011  wrote:
> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
> never able to capitalize on this.
>

When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
French and Hungarian.

At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
access both current news and a historical archive of news with
verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
free-as-in-freedom are good too.

This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
BBC...)

[1] 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response

-- 
Tom Morris


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Lodewijk wrote:

> Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 :
> 
>
> >
> > The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> > most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> > countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred
> languages
> > and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews
> was
> > never able to capitalize on this.
> >
> > Theo
> >
> >
> Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
> diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
> white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the
> 'global
> south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
> etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
> only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
> language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
> Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
> be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
> but on many others we're not.


You seem to have misunderstood my point. The diverse base is the number of
communities we have, not a mix of it. There are homogeneous language groups
and communities, I never disputed that but there are so many of them. It has
something to do with sociology, why certain type of individuals or groups
gravitate towards certain things. I think you know, but others might not, I
am from the Global south. There is something different that attracted me
towards the projects. It is and was open for me to join, as I am sure it was
for anyone in my part of the world, the difference is, you can not go and
get people to care and recruit just for the sake of having diversity. This
in no way means the projects are not diverse, there are projects in both my
native tongues, I merely chose enwp.

For example, can you tell me how many similar Dutch language projects exist
similar to ours? in Netherlands? and from those, who work side-by-side by
French, German, Swahili or Hindi? I can make a call to translate and have
any message translated in 2 dozen languages within a day. In order to do
that, they have to have knowledge of multiple languages and how to edit.
These groups exist, there are volunteers in those languages willing to
contribute their time for nothing in return, we just can't tap it well
enough.

The case of English Wikipedia only echoes what the Dutch projects might
have. It *is* the language of old, white intellectuals, all the history of
the world reaffirms this notion, most anthropology looked at the world from
this perspective and in doing so, negated its own neutrality.

I beg to differ, we most certainly are diverse. You are just looking at a
single project or language and trying to find diversity in it, I am saying
look at the bigger picture and all the languages. English might be the most
widely spoken language and that is why you even have as much diversity as we
do now, compared to several other Romance languages you'd find even less
diversity in the contributor base, its simply a matter of a larger
contributor base. Maybe not on this list or the English Wikipedia as much as
we'd like to be, but there are dozens of mailing lists and projects in other
language, we are discussing this issue on just one of them.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrea Zanni]

I'm no expert here,
but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises.
I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians,
and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals,
especially because, right now, it relies on them.

Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and
secondary sources,
Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it
collects links about (not so recent) news.
Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place.
As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New
York Times website, which is much more update.

I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last
a single day, but instead
needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill
an informative gap,
because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different
articles on the same subjects,
but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them.
This could be an interesting direction.

Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia:
in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events)
people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial
facts on something that already happened.
If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place
where to write all that stuff.
Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things
have slowed down,
relying on the Wikinews article.

My 2cents, obviously.

Aubrey

2011/9/13 Tom Morris :
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011  wrote:
>> The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
>> most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
>> countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages
>> and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was
>> never able to capitalize on this.
>>
>
> When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I
> wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the
> smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi,
> French and Hungarian.
>
> At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish
> Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number
> of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often
> have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can
> access both current news and a historical archive of news with
> verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context
> provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for
> democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media
> available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be
> free-as-in-freedom are good too.
>
> This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less
> availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And,
> yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the
> BBC...)
>
> [1] 
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_restaurants
> [2] 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> 
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Przykuta]

> > And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
> > will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
> > and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
> > you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
> > text. If not today then in a year.
> >

Sometimes people look for old news, but our category system in Wikinews is not 
too good (alphabetical). Bugzilla knows this problem for years.


But - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and 
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:Random

and next use http://stats.grok.se/

Articles in en Wikinews are more popular, than articles in smaller Wikipedias

przykuta

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[me]

Zitat von Theo10011 :
> I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
> competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing
> field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
> being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
> bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won
> that race.

My main point was (although I didn't make it overly clear) not that  
"professionals" do inherently better work than amateurs/volunteers,  
but that they constantly dedicate eight working hours every day to  
creating content. That's something you can count on to provide the  
base load of the critical mass. Most volunteers on the other hand can  
only dedicate one or two hours a day and only if they have no other  
obligations. Sometimes volunteers stop contributing for no apparent  
reason. You cannot create large articles, background pieces or  
interviews in just one or two hours. That's why professionals are  
useful.

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:03 PM,  wrote:

>
> Zitat von Theo10011 :
> > I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
> > competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the
> playing
> > field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
> > being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
> > bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already
> won
> > that race.
>
> My main point was (although I didn't make it overly clear) not that
> "professionals" do inherently better work than amateurs/volunteers,
> but that they constantly dedicate eight working hours every day to
> creating content. That's something you can count on to provide the
> base load of the critical mass. Most volunteers on the other hand can
> only dedicate one or two hours a day and only if they have no other
> obligations. Sometimes volunteers stop contributing for no apparent
> reason. You cannot create large articles, background pieces or
> interviews in just one or two hours. That's why professionals are
> useful.
>
> My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is
what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was
built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still
be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better
work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are
passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid
to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.

You are also making generalization about volunteers, that they might have
only one or two hours to contribute. Even so, there are still thousands of
them, many, many more than how many people can be employed at a time.

My argument was, a) paying/hiring staff to edit a project is against the
general ethos of our movement b) why only pay Wikinews staff to approach
critical mass then? Why not Wikiquote or Wiktionary? or some new project? c)
What happens when the staff finishes it's term? who sustains the project
then? If people didn't care earlier they are likely to not care later and
lastly d) You can not form a community from paid employees, they will leave
and when the position ends, who runs the project?

Regards
Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011  wrote:
> My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is
> what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was
> built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still
> be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better
> work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are
> passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid
> to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.

Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.

For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for
Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on
many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't
have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews
editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things
for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time
the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just
had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find
someone who would program that bot?

The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I
have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow
without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews
edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News
services regularly have more than 100 news per day.

I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which
English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing
articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant
community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news
service is not a news service without constant care, which could be
done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per
month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not
at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not
one article on Wikipedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic 
wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011  wrote:
>> My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work
>> is
>> what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that
was
>> built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we
>> still
>> be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently
better
>> work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are
>> passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get
>> paid
>> to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
> 
> Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
> accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
> replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
> problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
> 

Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or
even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when
I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on
all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT
MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was
doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid,
uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments
about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things
if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very
frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one. 

Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 18:19, Yaroslav M. Blanter  wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:48:58 +0200, Milos Rancic 
>>
>> Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
>> accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
>> replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
>> problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
>>
>
> Actually, a precise statement would be SOME volunteers do not care. Or
> even MANY volunteers do not care. I always had difficulties, at least when
> I was still active on Russian Wikipedia, but I believe this is the issue on
> all projects, to explain that some things just need to be done DOES NOT
> MATTER WHAT. And these things need to be done properly. And if nobody was
> doing them I felt myself personally responsible for doing this stupid,
> uninteresting, dull but necessary staff, and was obliged to hear arguments
> about the wiki way, working for pleasure, and advises of not doing things
> if I do not find them interesting enough. I must say this was a very
> frustrating experience. But I hope I am not the only one.

I probably worded it wrongly, but, I think that you didn't get my
point anyway. One thing is to do boring job, the same thing is to have
responsibility for taken job, even it's about voluntarism; completely
other thing is to do that on time for prolonged period of time. If
it's not about really really motivating task (I mean, you could find
such volunteers if it's about sex), it's hard to organize  of volunteers to do something in particular time frame.

The problem is the next:
* There is a need to have news every day and to keep eye on important
events 24/7.
* Note that it's not about regular stewards' night shift, when we have
bots and users who warn us about irregularities and that the most
complex irregular tasks require 10-15 minutes of doing simple things,
like clicking on right links is.
* Take as many volunteers as you want and give them the task to care about it.
* Try to cover 24/7.

It is likely that you'll need ~5 persons per small amount of time
(let's say, one hour per day) + some people to replace the core
editors for weekends or so -- to be sure that everything is covered
and that volunteers are still motivated as they don't have too harsh
tasks. That's around 100-200 highly involved persons, which is around
the top Wikipedias -- as 100 edits/month is not enough for being
"highly involved": 10 edits per workday makes more than 200 edits
requirement and I don't think that any of Wikipedia editors think that
their productive Wikipedian day was when they made 10 edits. Now, just
imagine how many edits have to be made during *one* day to create a
decent news story. And note that you'll have to *organize* them,
actually, unlike in the Wikipedia case.

In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor
pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only
other option is to hire someone to do that job.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
> In other words, to have successful Wikinews, you have to have editor
> pool which have Wikipedia itself and to be more structured. The only
> other option is to hire someone to do that job.

Wikinewsie Brian McNeil's signature says, "Facts don't cease to be
facts, but news ceases to be news."

The corollary to this is: "At some point, news stops being news. A
Wikipedia article never stops being an article."

This is where the tension lies -- Wikinews is not a clean mapping over
of Wikipedia principles. Wikis depend on eventualism: given an
infinite timeline, pages eventually get better. News cannot survive on
that. The "decay" of the value of breaking news and eventualism are at
odds with each other.

The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
latter.

-Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

Hi Milos

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:18 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011  wrote:
> > My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work
> is
> > what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was
> > built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we
> still
> > be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better
> > work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are
> > passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get
> paid
> > to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
>
> Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be
> accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were
> replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the
> problem of principle, but the problem of having job done.
>

You are arguing that volunteers do not care about accuracy, I think that's a
sweeping assessment for a very wide spectrum of volunteers. What about the
hundred of editors covering breaking news stories on enwp by the minute?
Would you like to dispute that they don't care or strive for accuracy as a
story develops?

Yes, more volunteer position were replaced by paid staff, that did
not necessarily make things any efficient. I can instead argue it created
un-necessary bureaucracy and hierarchy where it didn't exist before and made
things more inefficient. A lot of people would dispute if there is wisdom in
replacing tasks that are handled by volunteers with staff- OTRS, IRC,
certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the
upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a
Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his
departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1] In the mean
time, there is an entire community department with more than a dozen staff
members yet the appearance is, it is still preferable that the community
handle it.


> For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for
> Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on
> many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't
> have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews
> editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things
> for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time
> the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just
> had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find
> someone who would program that bot?
>

That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors.
Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I
never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am
all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more
bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community
members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they
should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care
about what happens next.


>
> The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I
> have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow
> without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews
> edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News
> services regularly have more than 100 news per day.
>

I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it
can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty
of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators,
micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not
hard if you know how to tap into it.


> I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which
> English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing
> articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant
> community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news
> service is not a news service without constant care, which could be
> done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per
> month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not
> at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not
> one article on Wikipedia.
>

My point still stands, you can not sustain a project on paid staff. If you
do, it is not a wiki, or a community, just office work.

Theo

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2#Election_Committee
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Sarah]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> of Wikipedia principles. Wikis depend on eventualism: given an
> infinite timeline, pages eventually get better. News cannot survive on
> that. The "decay" of the value of breaking news and eventualism are at
> odds with each other.
>
> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
> latter.
>
> -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
>
There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of
interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews
should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people.
Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary
people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd
experiences, etc.

It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some
good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some
original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles,
supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.

Sarah

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Dalton]

On 13 September 2011 13:06, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24,   wrote:
>> It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
>> paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
>> the project always stays above the critical mass.
>
> That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news
> source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned
> that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I
> said, heresy, For his ears :P

If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we
should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional
project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to
do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation.
We shouldn't stray away from that.

So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using
volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the
critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to
stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Morton]

The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical
mass of editors to overcome these issues.

So...

you could have a strict review system; if there were enough good reviewers
you could cover a broad spectrum of news; if there were enough editors
you could implement collaborative & freely edited original content; if there
was enough interested editors

The problem is that Wikinews already has a high barrier to entry - it
doesn't fit a model of casual contribution once or twice a week (or month).

Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial
full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia
doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a
more leisurely model.

For "news" that model does not simply cut-n-paste across.

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Kim Bruning]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
> The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical
> mass of editors to overcome these issues.
> 
> So...
> 
> Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial
> full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an encyclopaedia
> doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a
> more leisurely model.


Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps
wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due
to lack of it?

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

-- 

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>> of Wikipedia principles. Wikis depend on eventualism: given an
>> infinite timeline, pages eventually get better. News cannot survive on
>> that. The "decay" of the value of breaking news and eventualism are at
>> odds with each other.
>>
>> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
>> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
>> latter.
>>
>> -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
>>
> There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of
> interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews
> should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people.
> Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary
> people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd
> experiences, etc.
>
> It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some
> good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some
> original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles,
> supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
>


I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread:

Where Wikinews has been successful and clearly valuable is in what
those in journalism call "feature" content. Interviews with political
leaders, photography of events, and investigative pieces. These
verifiable forms of reporting are not time critical and don't demand
"full coverage" like breaking news beats. The Wikinews interview with
Shimon Peres is a good example:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel

And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
to have stalled lately.

WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."

Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.

Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.

-Andrew

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Sarah]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Sarah  wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>>> of Wikipedia principles. Wikis depend on eventualism: given an
>>> infinite timeline, pages eventually get better. News cannot survive on
>>> that. The "decay" of the value of breaking news and eventualism are at
>>> odds with each other.
>>>
>>> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
>>> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
>>> latter.
>>>
>>> -Andrew (above taken from an earlier, longer post)
>>>
>> There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of
>> interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews
>> should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people.
>> Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary
>> people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd
>> experiences, etc.
>>
>> It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some
>> good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some
>> original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles,
>> supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
>>
>
>
> I agree, and to quote from my reply in another thread:
>
> Where Wikinews has been successful and clearly valuable is in what
> those in journalism call "feature" content. Interviews with political
> leaders, photography of events, and investigative pieces. These
> verifiable forms of reporting are not time critical and don't demand
> "full coverage" like breaking news beats. The Wikinews interview with
> Shimon Peres is a good example:
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres_discusses_the_future_of_Israel
>
> And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
> mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
> normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
> that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
> to have stalled lately.
>
> WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."
>
> Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
>
> Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
>
> -Andrew

Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital
mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find
some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a
Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain
questions to those women?

That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in
the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in
the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us
a whole new depth of coverage.

This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news
organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and
collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have
that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give
people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to
have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without
stifling early efforts.

Sarah

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>> And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
>> mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
>> normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
>> that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
>> to have stalled lately.
>>
>> WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human 
>> knowledge."
>>
>> Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
>>
>> Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
>
> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital
> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find
> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a
> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain
> questions to those women?
>
> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in
> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in
> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us
> a whole new depth of coverage.
>
> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news
> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and
> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have
> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give
> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to
> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without
> stifling early efforts.

Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's
very much in line with this.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
http://vimeo.com/26469276

Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project
covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that
had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the
shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those
interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source
material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it
provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage
audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing
typed words.

-Andrew

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Achal Prabhala]

On Thursday 15 September 2011 12:40 AM, Andrew Lih wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah  wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>>> And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
>>> mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
>>> normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
>>> that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
>>> to have stalled lately.
>>>
>>> WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human 
>>> knowledge."
>>>
>>> Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
>>>
>>> Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
>> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital
>> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find
>> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a
>> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain
>> questions to those women?
>>
>> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in
>> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in
>> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us
>> a whole new depth of coverage.
>>
>> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news
>> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and
>> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have
>> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give
>> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to
>> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without
>> stifling early efforts.
> Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's
> very much in line with this.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
> http://vimeo.com/26469276
>
> Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project
> covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that
> had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the
> shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those
> interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source
> material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it
> provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage
> audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing
> typed words.

I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to 
comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells 
me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not 
quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the 
television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment 
feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what 
mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as 
journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance, 
is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a 
firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news 
channel's content per day.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the 
Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was 
founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and 
much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of 
journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded 
as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it 
currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the 
potential to be something really significant.

As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews 
to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be 
delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like 
perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought 
about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as 
Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be 
used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have 
fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I 
think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia 
squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the 
limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge 
that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion 
on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project 
once a few things are done).

A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of 
audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost 
none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping 
into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia 

Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[David Gerard]

On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala  wrote:

> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the
> Wikinews model.


No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool.
Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news
dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.

Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important
enough to die for.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Achal Prabhala]

On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala  wrote:
>
>> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the
>> Wikinews model.
>
> No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool.
> Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news
> dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.

The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I 
think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen 
journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind 
Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been 
to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is 
also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the 
infrastructure that could have really enabled it?

>
> Quality is important, but Wikinews seems to consider it important
> enough to die for.
>
>
> - d.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Achal Prabhala  wrote:

>
>
> I've been following the Wikinews discussion, and I've been hesitant to
> comment only because I know so little about it. The little I know tells
> me that it could be something great, and perhaps the reason it's not
> quite there yet is because it was ahead of it's time. Turn on the
> television news today and it's routine to see tweet-ins and live comment
> feeds from other social media; indeed, a significant chunk of what
> mainstream American television channels report these days is feedback as
> journalism. The other big thing happening here in India, for instance,
> is citizen journalism - a tired, catch-all phrase but nevertheless a
> firm reality - which forms at least two hours of every major news
> channel's content per day.
>

It really wasn't ahead of it's time. It is actually quiet behind its time.
Amateur news, bloggers broke that barrier much before.


>
> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the
> Wikinews model. But Wikinews started up in 2004...while Twitter was
> founded only in 2006, Apple's Iphone only hit the market in 2007...and
> much of the infrastructure that could enable the Wikinews model of
> journalism in mainstream media was built much after Wikinews was founded
> as a project. I don't know enough about Wikinews and what's plaguing it
> currently, but as an outsider it would seem to me that it has the
> potential to be something really significant.
>

I disagree, the world follows instant news model. News is faster than it has
even been, free and available in every conceivable format. You are treating
Wikinews as some distinct model, it really isn't. It's a wiki where they add
news instead of articles, nothing more. Let me tell you, what's plaguing it
currently- The review process.


>
> As for oral citations, or the idea of using audio and video interviews
> to record knowledge, all of us who worked on the project would be
> delighted if there were unintended consequences to the project, like
> perhaps being of use to Wikinews, which is not something we thought
> about at the outset. Michel (Castelo Branco) suggested earlier that as
> Wikinews explicitly allows original research as a policy, it could be
> used as a workaround for oral citations on Wikipedia. We don't have
> fixed ideas about this and welcome discussion in general - though I
> think there is value in facing the boundaries of citation on Wikipedia
> squarely. We would like to offer up the project as a way to confront the
> limitations of citations as currently allowed, the problem of knowledge
> that isn't published in print, and, in time, open up a larger discussion
> on this. (We'll be soon posting a wrap-up of the oral citations project
> once a few things are done).
>

I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research
requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not
a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.


> A related - and interesting - problem/opportunity is the vast amount of
> audio-video archival material that already exists in the world, almost
> none of which has any direct effect on Wikipedia. In most cases, tapping
> into the 'raw' archive would be disallowed within Wikipedia on the
> grounds of it constituting a 'primary source'. (This is also a problem
> for Wikipedians who'd like to use private archives - even corporate
> archives - as sources, but can't). But there is nothing to say that
> Wikinews could not tap into this vast pool of curated material and
> create 'news' out of it. In general, it would appear that Wikinews has a
> set of very flexible policies and practices, and it seems as if they
> could be put to boundless good use.
>

Wikinews policies aren't the problem. Wikipedia will still not accept them
and it should not. You can also try Wiktionary or Wikiquote. The issue is
the research is original, not peer-reviewed or published by a reputable
third party and hence, would remain a primary source. And no, Wikinews will
not be able to tap into the raw pool. That would be a different project all
together. Since covering archives and Breaking news stories are two very
separate areas.


Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Sarah]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 13:10, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Sarah  wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:34, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>>> And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented,
>>> mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic
>>> normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor
>>> that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem
>>> to have stalled lately.
>>>
>>> WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human 
>>> knowledge."
>>>
>>> Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
>>>
>>> Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
>>
>> Yes, exactly. I'm currently working on an article about female genital
>> mutilation. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if I could find
>> some women who had experienced this, arrange an interview, contact a
>> Wikinews person in London, or Kenya, and ask them to put certain
>> questions to those women?
>>
>> That way, you can make the interview and the article interactive, in
>> the sense that you could ask the women to address specific points in
>> the article, then link to the video in that section. It would give us
>> a whole new depth of coverage.
>>
>> This is exactly what it's like to work for an international news
>> organization, where someone in the Timbuktu office has an idea, and
>> collaborates with someone in the local area to produce it. We do have
>> that potential as a movement. It's just a question of how to give
>> people the confidence, and the space to add their material. And to
>> have sensible editorial policies that encourage quality without
>> stifling early efforts.
>
> Yes, and if you look at Achal Prabhala's Oral Citations project, it's
> very much in line with this.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
> http://vimeo.com/26469276
>
> Also, by coincidence, in the 1990s I oversaw a masters student project
> covering FGM in Africa which had original reporting with women that
> had undergone the procedure. Instead of that story just sitting on the
> shelf, wouldn't it be great to have that body of reporting and those
> interviews as part of a Wikimedia project that could be source
> material? I focus in on A/V in particular for this effort, because it
> provides a level of verifiability. Of course you can still fake/stage
> audio and video, but it's more involved to do that than synthesizing
> typed words.
>
> -Andrew
>
I think the oral citation project is a wonderful idea. I would extend
it to the whole world, including areas rich in written sources,
because there are always stories out there that give you more depth.

The student project you describe would be a great resource to add to
the Wikipedia article. Could it be done?

Sarah

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Achal Prabhala  wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday 15 September 2011 01:43 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> > On 14 September 2011 21:02, Achal Prabhala  wrote:
> >
> >> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world now follows the
> >> Wikinews model.
> >
> > No, you're describing bare skimming of the unedited social media pool.
> > Wikinews follows a process-heavy review model, so laborious that news
> > dies before getting through it and contributors give up and fork.
>
> The hazards of not knowing about how Wikinews works I guess :) But I
> think it would be right to say that Wikinews - at least in a citizen
> journalism context - was far ahead of mainstream media; behind
> Indymedia, but ahead of many others. And that the reason I haven't been
> to Indymedia (or read anything significant from there in a long time) is
> also possibly because it was ahead of the curve, i.e. ahead of the
> infrastructure that could have really enabled it?
>
>
Ahh.Blogs? News-aggregators?

'Citizen journalism' etc. and repeatedly calling it ahead of the curve seems
rather hyperbolic. Are you forgetting an entire generation of bloggers that
dominated the mainstream media and continue to do.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Sarah]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011  wrote:
> I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research
> requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not
> a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.

The no original research policy was never intended to keep out
material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own
opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original
research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have
to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push
the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal
view of what that means.

Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about
the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of
people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV
issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text.
Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and
not interpreted.

Sarah

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011  wrote:
> > I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research
> > requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is
> not
> > a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
>
> The no original research policy was never intended to keep out
> material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own
> opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original
> research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have
> to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push
> the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal
> view of what that means.
>
> Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about
> the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of
> people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV
> issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text.
> Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and
> not interpreted.
>
> Sarah
>
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I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources
from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why
their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those
thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement
exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those
standards.

Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found
somewhere.

Theo
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Dalton]

On 14 September 2011 18:34, Kim Bruning  wrote:
> Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup.

Yes, and that went really well, didn't it? ;)

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[M. Williamson]

Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project
so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through
community efforts with no paid editors.


2011/9/14 Kim Bruning 

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
> > The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical
> > mass of editors to overcome these issues.
> >
> > So...
> >
> > Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial
> > full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an
> encyclopaedia
> > doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a
> > more leisurely model.
>
>
> Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps
> wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due
> to lack of it?
>
> sincerely,
>Kim Bruning
>
> --
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Heather Ford]

On Sep 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Theo10011 wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah  wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011  wrote:
>> 
>> Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about
>> the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of
>> people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV
>> issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text.
>> Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and
>> not interpreted.
>> 
>> Sarah
>> 
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>> 
> 
> I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources
> from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why
> their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those
> thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement
> exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those
> standards.

I'm not sure how this is related to the multimedia and images question? Will 
having multimedia illustrating an article mean that we have more cure-alls and 
diet-pills articles? Or is this a slippery-slope argument? 

> 
> Now I wonder who I can cite for this picture of Bigfoot(allegedly) I found
> somewhere.
> 
> Theo
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Heather Ford 
Ethnographer: Ushahidi / SwiftRiver
http://ushahidi.com | http://swiftly.org 
@hfordsa on Twitter
http://hblog.org


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011  wrote:
> certain Elections come to mind. For example, there is the recent case of the
> upcoming steward election which was previously handled by Cary as a
> Volunteer Coordinator (among several dozen things Cary did) but since his
> departure, those tasks have been handed back to volunteers.[1]

Stewards had difficulties because Cary is not Volunteer Coordinator
anymore, although organizing elections is not too hard task. Cary
organized the first elections in 2011, although he was not VC anymore.
2009-2010 were not so bright years for stewards. *Fortunately*, on
last two elections we've got a couple of stewards who deal more with
stewards meta issues, although both elections were on the edge not to
be held. Just because of Cary we had those elections.

> That is not exactly what I talked about. I referred to regular editors.
> Bot-writing is not a common task everyone can do, or do well at least, I
> never disputed anything about providing more tech help to any project. I am
> all for it, in fact, I think we should look at ways of motivating more
> bot-work from the community. However this in no way means hire non-community
> members and then explain to them how wikis work, what we need and how they
> should go about writing a bot. They might perform the task but not care
> about what happens next.

The same is with positions which require more specific organizational
and professional knowledge than just writing articles in wiki code.
Editing encyclopedia is quite different than editing news edition.
Tasks of Wikinews editors (not journalists/contributors, editors) are
comparable to the tasks of WMF management. You have to have employed
people to take care about paying bills, otherwise you won't have
servers. Similarly, you have to have people who care about integrity
of Wikinews, otherwise you won't have functional news source.

While I prefer to see volunteers to do the job, I would be happy to
explain to one employee (better from community background than not)
how to program, maintain and develop those bots.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we
> should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional
> project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to
> do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation.
> We shouldn't stray away from that.
>
> So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using
> volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the
> critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to
> stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?

The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon
Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees?

I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need
for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would
be Wikinews community.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011  wrote:
> I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it
> can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty
> of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators,
> micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not
> hard if you know how to tap into it.

Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is
the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day
(there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per
day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly
organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future
more than any other project.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
> sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
> latter.

As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews
requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet
running. There is nothing artificial in that.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[KIZU Naoko]

I'm hesitate to chime in, not only I've kept saying I'm on a wikibreak
- but I'm really on a break, my doctor said I had to give a full rest
and no new task anymore till the time allows again! - but also I'd
been inactive on Wikinews, but let me point some out.

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:21 AM, M. Williamson  wrote:
> Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project
> so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through
> community efforts with no paid editors.

1) Regardless how you esteem their achievement, Italian speaking
community decided to draw a line in "the area both Wikipedia and
Wikinews cover". They eliminated "Current Events" type page on the
Italian Wikipedia and any fresh ongoing things should be only accepted
onto the Italian Wikinews. (check your farovite Wikipedia "Current
Events" page to see if you find a link to the Italian equivalent).

2) Everyone has its own systematic bias. Major media too. Even on a
certain Wikinews edition short of original reports, carefully
synthesized media reports could help readership to widen their view to
the things falling out from major media available in their
language(s), if such is available on Wikinews).

On the other side, both media and publishers are doing more than
writing articles: there is a lot of things to maintain. Behind most of
major successful Wikipedias I'd point out such people behind the stage
are working, from the WMF staffers to Chapter paid people. It would be
a topic worth to discuss sister projects including Wikinews are being
paid attention as much as Wikipedia in regard of maintenance and
outreach.

Cheers,

>
>
> 2011/9/14 Kim Bruning 
>
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 07:17:49PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
>> > The elephant in the room in all this is that Wikinews lacks the critical
>> > mass of editors to overcome these issues.
>> >
>> > So...
>> >
>> > Producing a functional daily news outlet (website) requires a substantial
>> > full time staff... of course so does an encyclopaedia, but an
>> encyclopaedia
>> > doesn't have a weekly time limit on story completion... so we can adopt a
>> > more leisurely model.
>>
>>
>> Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup. Perhaps
>> wikinews needs something similar, and never really booted properly, due
>> to lack of it?
>>
>> sincerely,
>>Kim Bruning
>>
>> --
>>
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-- 
KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Dalton]

On 15 September 2011 05:12, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
>> If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we
>> should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional
>> project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to
>> do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation.
>> We shouldn't stray away from that.
>>
>> So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using
>> volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the
>> critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to
>> stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?
>
> The answer on this question is the same as above. Did we abandon
> Wikipedia just because it was necessary to have WMF employees?
>
> I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need
> for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would
> be Wikinews community.

Wikipedia has never had paid staff writing content, which is what was
suggested for Wikinews. The community doesn't need managing, it needs
to be large enough to produce enough content to attract readers (some
of whom will then become writers, and the project will become
self-sustaining).

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 14:34, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> Wikipedia has never had paid staff writing content, which is what was
> suggested for Wikinews. The community doesn't need managing, it needs
> to be large enough to produce enough content to attract readers (some
> of whom will then become writers, and the project will become
> self-sustaining).

Wikipedia is attractive without having to add 100 articles per day
which won't be interesting tomorrow and without large community. Proof
for that are many smaller Wikipedias.

Not everything is working on voluntarism exclusively: among them,
servers and creating very large community around news service which
doesn't have news.

And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the beginning.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Kim Bruning]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 03:21:23PM -0700, M. Williamson wrote:
> Only the English Wikipedia, and while en.wp is our most successful project
> so far, there are other successful Wikipedias that were formed only through
> community efforts with no paid editors.

True, but they were seeded by people from the original en.wp, which
was already running at that time (and which had originally been
seeded by paid editing, and the occaisional data dump from nupedia
and gnupedia)  Also, the requirements for wikinews might be much
different from those of wikipedia, and need a different seed group.

sincerly, 
Kim Bruning
-- 

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Kim Bruning]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:26:42PM +0100, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> On 14 September 2011 18:34, Kim Bruning  wrote:
> > Actually, wikipedia did have a paid full-time editor at bootup.
> 
> Yes, and that went really well, didn't it? ;)

Apart from some minor issues with people fighting over credit O:-);
yes, that went astoundingly well, in fact!

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> > The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
> > sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
> > latter.
>
> As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews
> requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet
> running. There is nothing artificial in that.
>

That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers
running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community
fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.

I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on
single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of
eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."

Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be
great to see more moves into that area.

-Andrew
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

>
>
> And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the
> beginning.
>
>
Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.

In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).

-Andrew
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andrew Lih]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Andrew Lih  wrote:

>
> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>

In fact, if you look at the process-heavy system that Wikinews has created
over the years, and the desire to have paid staff be part of the team, the
more it resembles Nupedia.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Writing_an_article
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>> > The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for
>> > sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the
>> > latter.
>>
>> As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews
>> requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet
>> running. There is nothing artificial in that.
>
> That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers
> running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community
> fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.

"running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never
heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF
(in relation to content projects, of course).

The problem is, of course, that it's hard to move out from the
Wikipedia-centric perspective; and that move will be needed soon for
Wikipedia itself.

Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs
also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has
given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for
writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those
things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care
about things when no one else is able to care.

> I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on
> single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of
> eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."

Nothing is perfect. That person shouldn't be the only one who does
that. Such person should be just someone on which the project could
default if nobody else is able to do that.

> Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be
> great to see more moves into that area.

Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and
one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass
around it.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>>
>> And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the
>> beginning.
>>
>>
> Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.

I thought that it was you in some of the threads, but I missed.

> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).

While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was
responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself.
Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up
very initial rules.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:52, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>>
>> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
>> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>>
>
> In fact, if you look at the process-heavy system that Wikinews has created
> over the years, and the desire to have paid staff be part of the team, the
> more it resembles Nupedia.
>
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Writing_an_article

I didn't create those rules, but some of the things behind those rules
have sense. Flagged revisions were introduced just because Wikinews
could be treated as relevant source of information, not blogs, by
Google.

I am not highly involved on English Wikinews and it shouldn't be
interpreted that en.wn community wants paid staff just because that's
my position.

I agree that structural changes are needed, but I don't think that
they are enough. Wikinews was popular just at the beginning of its
existence, while Wikipedia hype was at the top. Many of the present
rules didn't exist when Wikinews went down.

BTW, you are using Nupedia as archetype for "something wrong". While
it proved to be wrong, you are missing a lot of things if when you
compare one encyclopedia with one news outlet.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Fred Bauder]

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> And, as Andrew Lih mentioned, Wikipedia *had* payed editor at the
>> beginning.
>>
>>
> Did I say this? I don't remember saying so.
>
> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>
> -Andrew

Actually Larry Sanger was on the payroll of Bomis for a while when
Wikipedia was starting, perhaps as long a year. During that time Nupedia
was still operating.

Fred


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 06:12, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> I didn't say that we shouldn't rely on volunteers, I said that we need
> for the beginning one employed person: employee which management would
> be Wikinews community.

I think that the syntax in the last sentence is broken: The sense is
that managers of the employee(s) should be Wikinews community.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/14/11 11:10 AM, Sarah wrote:
>
> There are current affairs issues that would continue to be of
> interest. I've always felt this was an area Wikipedia and Wikinews
> should pursue: video interviews by Wikipedians of interesting people.
> Not necessarily celebrities or news types -- interviews with ordinary
> people, oral histories of certain communities, people who've had odd
> experiences, etc.
>
> It has been discussed a few times, and I know David Shankbone did some
> good ones, but for some reason it has been limited. Adding some
> original videos to our articles (adding them to Wikipedia articles,
> supplied by Wikinews) would be very attractive to readers, I think.
>

This is an interesting point.  In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised 
reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs.  
We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far 
more efficiently than ever.  The victim has been that long informative 
letters and diaries have become a thing of the past.  When that happens 
who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely 
on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of 
official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as 
insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot 
soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'. 
The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about 
before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his 
great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly 
records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a 
better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."

The narrative may be flawed and biased.  Similar narratives by others 
who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way.  
There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to 
get together to build a playground or other needed community facility. 
Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of 
today's world without falling into gnosis?

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andre Engels]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:

> This is an interesting point.  In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised
> reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs.
> We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far
> more efficiently than ever.  The victim has been that long informative
> letters and diaries have become a thing of the past.  When that happens
> who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely
> on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of
> official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as
> insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot
> soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'.
> The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about
> before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his
> great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly
> records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a
> better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
>
> The narrative may be flawed and biased.  Similar narratives by others
> who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way.
> There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to
> get together to build a playground or other needed community facility.
> Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of
> today's world without falling into gnosis?
>

Even if we would allow such as a resource, doing so would hardly do justice
to these reports. It would be possible to get one or two facts from such a
report, and I think it should be possible to do so, but publishing the
report either as a whole or in a complete summary would be problematic both
from a "No Original Research" perspective and from a relevancy perspective.
In the end, it is Wikipedia's task to make existing knowledge more widely
available, not to create new knowledge.

There should definitely be places where this material belongs, and in many
cases there are (I think of local historical societies, for example). The
question is, whether or not the WMF should aim to have such a place itself.
I have my doubts about it, because it does not look like an area where our
strongpoint (massive volunteer cooperation) has much additionial value, but
if the answer is yes, I think it should be as a new project - including it
in any of the existing projects would widen its scope so far that it would
water it down.

-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com
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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/15/11 11:51 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>> This is an interesting point.  In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised
>> reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs.
>> We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far
>> more efficiently than ever.  The victim has been that long informative
>> letters and diaries have become a thing of the past.  When that happens
>> who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely
>> on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of
>> official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as
>> insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot
>> soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'.
>> The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about
>> before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his
>> great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly
>> records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a
>> better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
>>
>> The narrative may be flawed and biased.  Similar narratives by others
>> who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way.
>> There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to
>> get together to build a playground or other needed community facility.
>> Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of
>> today's world without falling into gnosis?
> Even if we would allow such as a resource, doing so would hardly do justice
> to these reports. It would be possible to get one or two facts from such a
> report, and I think it should be possible to do so, but publishing the
> report either as a whole or in a complete summary would be problematic both
> from a "No Original Research" perspective and from a relevancy perspective.
> In the end, it is Wikipedia's task to make existing knowledge more widely
> available, not to create new knowledge.
>
> There should definitely be places where this material belongs, and in many
> cases there are (I think of local historical societies, for example). The
> question is, whether or not the WMF should aim to have such a place itself.
> I have my doubts about it, because it does not look like an area where our
> strongpoint (massive volunteer cooperation) has much additionial value, but
> if the answer is yes, I think it should be as a new project - including it
> in any of the existing projects would widen its scope so far that it would
> water it down.
>
I'm completely open to the notion that this could be on a completely 
different project from Wikinews.

Anything other than publishing as a whole would require some serious POV 
editing. Who would decide on what the important facts are? Nor is this a 
question of creating knowledge; the knowledge was there already in the 
mind of the person being interviewed.  The relevance can only be judged 
in the context of other similar memoirs about the same events.

Teaming up with local historical societies would be important.  I'm sure 
that many of them are already sitting on large collections of this 
material, and making it available is beyond their abilities. Massive 
volunteer cooperation is just as important to them as to us, but they 
have typically drawn from a different demographic.

If we can send people into communities to take pictures of every 
important building, it should be just as possible to send them there to 
collect stories.

For the U.S., given Obama's push on job creation, the W.P.A.'s cultural 
programs in the 1930s could be a great example.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/14/11 5:01 PM, Heather Ford wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Theo10011 wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Sarah  wrote:
>>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011  wrote:
>>>
>>> Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about
>>> the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of
>>> people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV
>>> issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text.
>>> Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and
>>> not interpreted.
>> I had no idea we were so liberal about original research/primary sources
>> from the countless hours I spent in #wikipedia-en-help telling new users why
>> their cited references were rejected. Well, now we can finally have those
>> thousands of articles about cure-alls and diet-pills, and penis-enlargement
>> exercises, since the manufacturer's own research would satisfy those
>> standards.
> I'm not sure how this is related to the multimedia and images question? Will 
> having multimedia illustrating an article mean that we have more cure-alls 
> and diet-pills articles? Or is this a slippery-slope argument?
>
I suppose such articles have their place, as do the manufacturer's own 
research and accumulated testimonials. Stating where the information is 
from is also important.  If we can find no independent scientific 
research about the product we should state that too.  The public needs 
to know this.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih  wrote:

>> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
>> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>
> While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was
> responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself.
> Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up
> very initial rules.¨

Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of
the history...

The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had
nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could
have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would
have had would have been a premature Citizendium.

As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought
the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was
doing more harm than good.


-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Fred Bauder]

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>
>>> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid
>>> head
>>> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>>
>> While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was
>> responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself.
>> Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up
>> very initial rules.¨
>
> Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of
> the history...
>
> The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had
> nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could
> have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would
> have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
>
> As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought
> the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he
> was
> doing more harm than good.
>
>
> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

Were you editing back then? My memory is quite different. He says on his
user page, "I named it, crafted much of the policy that now guides the
project, and led the project for its first year." which accords with my
memory.

If you look at his early edits I think an accurate picture could be
reconstructed, although the mailing lists played a much more significant
role back then.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20010615133804&limit=500&target=Larry+Sanger

Fred


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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 15:07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
 wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>
>>> In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid head
>>> didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>>
>> While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was
>> responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself.
>> Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up
>> very initial rules.¨
>
> Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of
> the history...

"not so, not so =" "You like Sanger" and "it should be forgot"? :P

> The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had
> nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could
> have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would
> have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
>
> As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought
> the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he was
> doing more harm than good.

One thing is what he wanted, the other is what he did. He created the
roots of Wikipedia, no matter if he preferred Nupedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Kudu]

I agree with Theo, at least to an extent. It seems to me that there is
an *eternal* competition even between professional offerings to offer
not only the latest news, but the best news. On the other hand, I do
agree that I'm reluctant to use even the English Wikinews for
informational purposes as the articles aren't old compared to the time
when they became effective, but simply out of date. Sometimes, I don't
find any technology articles from the past month.

~K

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:34 AM, Theo10011  wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:37 PM, emijrp  wrote:
>
>> I agree with this analysis.
>>
>> 2011/9/13 
>>
>> > English Wikinews is in a market with many, many professional
>> > competitors. Competitors with a paid staff that steadily create
>> > reliable news output quick and in most cases _for free_. While good
>> > encyclopedias were still sold for thousands of dollars in 2001, news
>> > were already available for free back then. So there's no big advantage
>> > for the reader in using Wikinews instead of some other news resource.
>> >
>> > A further point is steadiness. A Wikipedia doesn't loose much value if
>> > you leave it unedited for some days because of contributor shortage.
>> > On Wikinews on the other hand most readers will leave forever if there
>> > are no current news since days. It's very hard to build a userbase if
>> > you cannot guarantee a continuous flow of new news.
>> >
>> > And it's hard to gain authors if you have no readers because the texts
>> > will only be of interest for a few days. If you write a news article
>> > and noone reads it you have wasted your time. On Wikipedia however, if
>> > you write an article you can rest assured that people will read your
>> > text. If not today then in a year.
>> >
>> > Other than a Wikipedia where even a single person can build an
>> > increasingly useful resource over time, Wikinews has a critical mass.
>> > If it doesn't reach the criticial mass of steady contributions, the
>> > project will never lift off.
>> >
>> >
>> > It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by
>> > paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that
>> > the project always stays above the critical mass.
>> >
>> > Ideally that isn't done in the oversaturated market for English
>> > language news but in a language that doesn't have any native language
>> > news outlets. Pick the language with the biggest number of speakers (I
>> > guess that'll be in rural Africa or Asia) that has no own media and
>> > hire an editorial team. Send them out to make contacts into the
>> > diaspora of the language and into the countryside to find volunteer
>> > reporters and correspondents. Let them do a mix of world news and
>> > original local news reporting. Go into print. A few newspapers per
>> > village will probably suffice if you distribute it to the right places
>> > and propagate sharing.
>> >
>> > Provide free and open news to people who haven't had access to native
>> > content before.
>> >
>> > That of course means spending some money. Perhaps it won't work. But I
>> > think it is worth actually exploring it further and trying it out. At
>> > least that would be a form of Wikinews that could actually _make a
>> > difference_. The current model of "give them a wiki and don't do much
>> > else until six years later the project crumbles to dust" does not lead
>> > to anything making a difference.
>> >
>> > Marcus Buck
>> > User:Slomox
>> >
>> >
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>> >
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>
>
> I don't quiet agree with that analysis. You comparison with professional
> competitors might have held true in the last age of publishing, the playing
> field has been much more leveled. Even the New York Times has a hard time
> being competitive in this age, when they can't compete with individual
> bloggers posting and copying stories from everywhere. Amateurs already won
> that race.
>
> The same point applies to Encyclopedias- Wikipedia is proof that just about
> anyone can contribute to an encyclopedia, not just a published versions  by
> white, old, Academicians and instead refine it, continuously to compete with
> any other Encyclopedia. Now, the difference of concept between an
> Encyclopedia and a News source are undeniable, you can not refine a news
> article and you have to be correct and quick at the same time. The
> difference is, Wikipedia already does this, breaking stories do link back
> Wikipedia article from Google News. The difference between the two projects
> is the number of contributors.
>
> The concept of this movement is based mainly on volunteers. it has proven
> that r

Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Fred Bauder  wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:46, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>>
 In my book I described Nupedia, and how that system of having a paid
 head
 didn't work out (namely, Larry Sanger as editor in chief).
>>>
>>> While I don't like Sanger, it shouldn't be forgot that he was
>>> responsible for building the initial system on Wikipedia itself.
>>> Wikinews, unlike Wikipedia, requires larger care; not just setting up
>>> very initial rules.¨
>>
>> Not so, and not so. I don't square with either of your interpretation´of
>> the history...
>>
>> The fact that Larry Sanger did not pan out as an editor in chief had
>> nothing to do with the fact that he was paid for his work. He could
>> have worked for peanuts or completely gratis, and what we would
>> have had would have been a premature Citizendium.
>>
>> As for "building" the initial system of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger fought
>> the building of it tooth and nail to the last, until Jimbo realized he
>> was
>> doing more harm than good.
>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
> Were you editing back then? My memory is quite different. He says on his
> user page, "I named it, crafted much of the policy that now guides the
> project, and led the project for its first year." which accords with my
> memory.
>
> If you look at his early edits I think an accurate picture could be
> reconstructed, although the mailing lists played a much more significant
> roll back then.
>
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20010615133804&limit=500&target=Larry+Sanger
>


Haha, no, I wasn't editing tnen, but since quite a few years after that time,
and definitely up to the time when I started, you couldn't delete revision by
revision, a person curious like myself was able to get a reasonably
non-distorted
view of the history. Arguably The Cunctator has a much larger claim to having
shaped the ethos of Wikipedia in those early days than Sanger. Certainly The
Cunctators vision reigned supreme until these latter disturbing times when
it seems Sangers vision is re-asserting itself over Wikinews and sad to say
over Wikipedia too. Do you recall Sangers obsession about how wikipedia
should be "family friendly"?


-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/14/11 1:44 PM, Sarah wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 14:28, Theo10011  wrote:
>> I doubt that would be enough to satisfy the no original research
>> requirement. The idea linking back to a Wikimedia project as a source is not
>> a new one, it has been tried many times and doesn't work.
> The no original research policy was never intended to keep out
> material like this. Its purpose is to stop editors adding their own
> opinions to the text of articles. But we have always had original
> research in the form of images; indeed, we encourage it. We just have
> to be careful that images on a contentious article don't unfairly push
> the reader in a certain direction, but we normally take a very liberal
> view of what that means.

NOR began as a way of dealing with physics cranks, but by trying to 
define such policies mare accurately we too easily pervert its 
intention. A fashionable criticism is that someone introducing a 
different perspective is engaging in original research.  That can lead 
to acrimonious and futile debates about the nature of original research 
and opinion. Yes, we want original photos as a way of avoiding copyright 
problems, but at the same time people complain about primary textual 
sources.
> Adding video-taped interviews is the next step. Imagine articles about
> the Second World War containing video interviews by Wikipedians of
> people who lived through certain parts of it. There is no inherent POV
> issue there, so long as we observe NPOV, just as we do with text.
> Primary sources are already allowed, so long as used descriptively and
> not interpreted.
>
Any inherent POV is in the selection process.  The choice needs to be 
short enough to avoid overwhelming the article, but if it's too short we 
risk the complaint of being out of context.  The full interview needs to 
be readily available somewhere to enable verification not only of 
accuracy but also of context.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/14/11 9:12 PM, Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:03, Theo10011  wrote:
>> I think Wikinews needs to find its own identity first. There is no way it
>> can compete with large news sites you are thinking of, but there are plenty
>> of other ways it can have its own identity. In the age of news aggregators,
>> micro-blogging and smartphones, getting constant feed of information is not
>> hard if you know how to tap into it.
> Wikinews can compete with large sites. And not just that! Wikinews is
> the only Wikimedia project which could have 100k+ new articles per day
> (there are ~7M of inhabitants of Serbia, where at least 100 news per
> day could be generated; there are ~7B of humans), if properly
> organized. Thus, Wikinews is Wikimedia movement ticket for the future
> more than any other project.
>

I don't think that the Serbian situation scales very well.  100 news 
articles per day is even a lot for readers to handle.  Serbian project 
success depends a lot on the language/country correlation.  It also does 
not take long to get from Belgrade to the furthest part of the country. 
A New Zealand wikinews buried in a larger English language project won't 
attract a lot of attention outside New Zealand.

Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of 
the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a 
major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within 
minutes of the event.  That article and many corrections went on line 
immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Anthony]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Andrea Zanni  wrote:
> I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last
> a single day, but instead
> needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill
> an informative gap,
> because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different
> articles on the same subjects,
> but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them.
> This could be an interesting direction.

A wiki for news that doesn't last a single day, but instead needs a
history and a timetable is already done.  It's called Wikipedia.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/15/11 8:50 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih  wrote:
>> That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the 
>> servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to 
>> Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing. 
> "running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never
> heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF
> (in relation to content projects, of course).

This just brings us back to the function of the WMF.  At one it was just 
a matter of keeping the servers running, and ensuring that the content 
remains available forever. To the discomfort of some that role has expanded.

> Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs
> also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has
> given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for
> writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those
> things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care
> about things when no one else is able to care.

I don't know about that.  Wikisource already has more scanned books 
available than it can handle, even if we just limit ourselves to those 
where the public domain status is absolutely indisputable.  A relatively 
small numbers should still be scanned for the sake of 
comprehensiveness.  The big challenge is in how to make this useful to a 
larger audience.

I don't see a big money issue for Wiktionary either.

The WM-CA medicine project still comes down to one dedicated person 
funding the scholarship. For now it's experimental, but its future 
depends on an analysis of the current experiment.

The fact remains that none of your examples involves hiring someone. 
What's the point of hiring someone for Wikinews before we even know 
where it's heading.  The volunteer community would still need to define 
that person's job.
>> Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be
>> great to see more moves into that area.
> Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and
> one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass
> around it.
Collectively I'm sure we can do better than one feature per month.  If 
Serbian Wikinews can do something different that's fine too.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> On 09/15/11 8:50 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs
>> also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has
>> given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for
>> writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those
>> things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care
>> about things when no one else is able to care.
>
> I don't know about that.  Wikisource already has more scanned books
> available than it can handle, even if we just limit ourselves to those
> where the public domain status is absolutely indisputable.  A relatively
> small numbers should still be scanned for the sake of
> comprehensiveness.  The big challenge is in how to make this useful to a
> larger audience.

It is true that we have more English scanned books than we could
transcribe in a hundred years, but there are many languages which have
very few scanned books available online, and there are some important
English works which are not available as scans yet.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 21:38, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> I don't see a big money issue for Wiktionary either.

It's not about big money, it's about money necessary for a project to live.

Targeting articles in medicine is quite good, as they are necessary
and not covered as well as, for example, astronomy is. But, it shows
that even English Wikipedia requires organized (not spontaneous) work
to cover some areas of knowledge. Wikinews needs it for the roots.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Nikola Smolenski]

On 16/09/11 20:59, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of
> the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a

I was thinking along the same lines. Science news that aren't dumbed down?

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Re: [Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 19:59, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> Wikinews needs to redefine its role. Scooping the big news stories of
> the day isn't it ... not as long as Wikipedia can begin developing a
> major article on something like the recent Virginia earthquake within
> minutes of the event.  That article and many corrections went on line
> immediately without waiting for the availability of a reviewer.
>

Not to toot my own horn, but in the run up to the UK tuition fees
debate in Parliament, I wrote a longish synthesis article for English
Wikinews on the topic which tried to basically give a synthesis of all
the important parts of the debate at the time:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_to_vote_on_tuition_fee_rise_on_Thursday

It eventually became a featured article.

To do news effectively, we need to be able to handle breaking news as
it breaks, produce detailed synthesis articles and have them approved
before major events (so people can be informed citizens about those
events), and provide useful original reporting.

I'm not convinced that English Wikinews is fundamentally broken
though: if we can find a way of breaking the review bottleneck, it
becomes simply a matter of throwing more people at the problem.

-- 
Tom Morris


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