On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 5:22 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I missed all the news programs last night. Is there anything on the iPlayer or elsewhere? Carcharoth

Carcharoth wrote: And of course some off-topic ranting. The original WSJ article shows how easy it is to put together a newspaper article of people's gripes. Which is not that surprising after eight and a half years of Wikipedia. But no way does it do a good job of identifying what is going on, in terms that stand up to analysis. And I mean something intermediate between sweeping generalisations and anecdotal evidence. Anyone else feel that Mr. Murdoch's little list beginning "1. Trash Google rather than actually noindex News Corp's pages" has Wikipedia as alternate new source somewhere on it? Charles

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote: Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for online the online versions of his news holdings. He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's search engine toward that purpose. It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those plans. If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would otherwise be valueless. If he's right about paid access being the most profitable model, then his self interest would be best served by fencing new content within a paid access only for a brief time: a week at most. By that time it becomes old news and there's more money to be made through advertising. Successive release to different venues is standard practice within the entertainment industry: a film starts with theatrical release, and once that exhausts itself it goes to cable, DVD and network television in descending order of profitability. If this is his plan and it becomes the news industry standard then it could make breaking news less burdensome upon Wikipedia's administrators: fewer people will read the news immediately and edit Wikipedia. Of course Wikipedia might also be the wrench in his plans because he can't prevent his readers from updating Wikipedia, significant news readership would shift to Wikipedia, and we have no reason to stop being a free venue. Perhaps that was Charles's intended inference? -Durova -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:19 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I do think it's a valid complaint. I feel that Wikinews might be pushing things; it is still essentially a distillation of other people's work. And the *most* newsworthy stuff makes it into Wikipedia. As a reader of Wikipedia I think it's absolutely great. As an editor I'm astonished at what fellow editors accomplish with topics. But if I put myself in the shoes of journalists and newspaper owners I would be thinking there's something unfair going on.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:29 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I recognise the name but I'm not entirely sure what part of my chain you're yanking. What was that story again? As I say, I love Wikipedia, but putting on media boots I can see us as a problem.

David Gerard wrote: Reading the blog comments and thinking about it, I decided "ingrates: hope the people you're planning to give Christmas presents all say they had hoped for something more expensive in a colour they actually liked". Charles

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 9:19 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: fundamentals have changed in ways that threaten its future. The New York Times has taken out multiple mortgages on its building; The Christian Science Monitor ceased daily print issues earlier this year. Wikipedians have been in the habit of treating reliable sources as a deep well that we can tap. The well is worried about running dry. Wikipedia really is that big and influential. When the typical business manager is losing money, that manager's response will be efforts to protect existing income streams. Businesses tend to be much smarter about exploring new revenue opportunities when they are doing well and think they can earn more money. When they're losing money they often act irrationally. Bold and innovative ideas are less likely to get implemented or even discussed because individuals take a political risk by proposing them. The reward for setting up any non-normative person for layoff is that one's own neck is less likely to feel the axe in the short run. So that Washington Post reporter hadn't considered the advertising revenue his newspaper was getting from Wikipedia's links to historic articles. It hadn't been discussed among his colleagues and nothing was being done to optimize it. He sounded intrigued and wanted to share it with his editors. A few months later he was working for the Huffington Post. -Durova -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I wonder how true this is. Perhaps I'll be laughed out of court... but my tendency when I read Wikipedia is that I see a sentence in an article, note that it is referenced, click the number to see what the reference is but *hardly* *ever* click the reference link either to confirm that the reference is accurate nor to find out more.

2009/11/27 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com>om>: We know that there is enough traffic for the SEO/spammer mob to think it is worth trying to get there links into the reference section of wikipedia. Wikipedia's traffic is also highly targets and actually buys stuff and clicks ads from time to time which makes getting some of it worthwhile. -- geni

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com> wrote: significantly after they donated 100,000 medium resolution images to Wikimedia Commons. Informally, the word is that their sales approximately doubled. -Durova -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

Durova wrote: The news "industry" is in as much a quandary as the music and film industries. It's a model that depends heavily on news as entertainment. That's the only model that seems to justify the /ad nauseam/ treatment of such topics as Anna Nicole Smith's death or the Balloon Boy of Colorado. If a Florida mother kills her infant daughter it's a tragic personal event, but it should have no real effect on the lives of persons away from the immediate situation. Yet another boring speech by a politician is not going to sell much news. Those who would critically read through such speeches are also likely to be just as critical of advertising, or to simply dismiss the ads as background noise. Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably that you can't copyright information. You can copyright expression, but Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news reports. News services at one time relied on the patronage of small town media who were delighted to receive anything from the outside world; they could in turn easily edit that news to suit the pleasure of their local advertisers. Now, readers have more access to other interpretations of the same information. If Murdoch charges for information, I can often go to another competing site and get it for free. If he is the only source for the information, someone with access can with impunity repeat that information on another site as long as he does so in different words. Conditions of use that treat public information as proprietary may very well be beyond the legal capacity of the commercial sites. I don't dispute that it's expensive to have newsworthy items properly covered by enough reporters for credibly objective treatment. A single embedded reporter is too vulnerable to infection from the tunnel-vision of those who embed him. At the same time, is an organisation like Wikinews in any position to send its own reporters to cover a difficult story? The cost of news coverage and the funding of those costs are headed in opposing directions. I have yet to see anyone with the vision to resolve that divergence. Ec

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I wonder how true that is, though. I'm sure people on Wikinews do sometimes cut 'n' paste, but I feel there's more to it than that. It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And, let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got money for it, funded by advertising. At best, all we can do is say "this guy saw what he saw and now I'm repeating it". Don't misunderstand me... I'm still on Wikipedia/Wikinews's side on this. But that's as a reader and editor, not as someone running a business. Surely it must be true to say that Wikinews would be nothing without paid journalists from whom we aggregate content?

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think the BBC comparison is quite a good one. Rupert Murdoch would like to kill the BBC. Yet the BBC does pay journalists to report stories. We only really report reports. Again, as a reader, I found Wikipedia amazing with its article on the flood in New Orleans. I found our article better than any news story. But we are rightly perceived as a threat and I'm not sure we can hold the moral high ground. I'm happy that we compete with Britannica. I'm not sure we should compete with newspapers.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 9:30 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think most Wikipedians support good journalism. The question is "are we harming them?" and "are we stealing?" Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. We've moved on from that. But should we have done? Did we over-reach? If there were a body of wiki-journalists going out, willing to give their work for free then we could have proper wiki-reporting. As things stand, we nick stuff, refactor it, and lay it down. Again, as a reader, Wikimedia projects are my go-to place. But I'm yet to hear that we can justify some of the stuff that goes on.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 10:25 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Do we? On topical subjects? So what's Wikinews for?

Follow-up story from Auntie Beeb: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8382477.stm

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com> wrote: That BBC story says, "By contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation counts only people who make five edits or more as an editor. This gives an editing population of about one million people across all languages. Of that total, the English edition of Wikipedia has about 40,000 editors." This is slightly misleading as it is actually referring to logged-in users only. I ran some numbers from the database dump. They say that over the last few months, we have had the following editing rates on enwiki on a per-month basis: ~600,000 distinct usernames and IP addresses recorded at least 1 edit ~100,000 distinct usernames and IP addresses recorded at least 6 edits ~150,000 distinct usernames recorded at least 1 edit ~42,000 distinct usernames recorded at least 6 edits Those are all per-month numbers. Logged-out editing is quite significant. - Carl

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote: You could say the same thing about goggle search, yet some of these organizations are claiming that google search is ripping them off for linking to them (and not just the google news headline scraping). It's complicated. The advertising income these kinds of sites get is strongly driven by keeping users within their garden. When someone pops into their site grabs only the information they need the paper makes a lot less money then if the users hang out. Compare to the standard grocer's practice of putting common goods (like milk) at the back of the store. I was told by a journalist that this is also why they don't link to sources and citations. I.e. "Foo releases revolutionary new paper on Bar"… and it's available online but mainstream news will almost never link to it. It I don't know if it's true, but it seems consistent. In that context it's easy to see why these organizations see Wikipedia as a clear threat to their business model: (1) The re-synthesis of information that goes into creating Wikipedia articles often reduces/removes the need to read source news articles, without infringing copyright. The kind of neutral analysis and synthesis that Wikipedia does (when its working right) is one of the things people used to go to news outlets for. (2) When people do follow the links from Wikipedia its often just for a quick check to exactly what they want. I'd speculate Wikipedia is less likely to have a misleading link than a machine generated search result. I'd expect readers to head back over to Wikipedia: It's a much better place to be to find out more than a typical newspaper site. (3) A lot of the traditional media has been fighting against the increasing expectation that useful information will be available for free using the argument that it is a fundamental truth that someone has to pay for it, so if we are not all paying for the paper then there is no way that we'll get the services a newspaper journalist provides. I don't think the existence of Wikipedia refutes this position completely, but it makes the argument much more difficult and complicated. (Ever wonder why newspapers articles are so frequently centred on reporting on the (in)accuracy of Wikipedia, when thats long since stopped being news and when there are thousands of other interesting stories to tell about Wikipedia? I think that happens because Wikipedia being free somewhat comprehensive and good is aspect of Wikipedia which is the most fundamentally incompatible with the thinking of people in that business. What we're doing is intuitive to people who have worked in Free Software; but it's deeply strange that it works at all to someone in the news business) I'm not completely sure how this all relates to this BBC blog entry… But in any case, there is nothing successful which is so boring that no one feels deeply threatened by it.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: to restructure incoming links from Wikipedia as entry points to their sites. It ought to be feasible for news site webmasters to design a functionality around certain keywords in historic articles, so that visitors are directed to other stories from that news source about the same subject. That would be quite useful and keep readers within their garden. For instance, the two NYTimes links for operat soprano Mignon Nevada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_Nevada One NYTimes source is a PDF hosting that goes nowhere; the other is a 1909 review for one of her performances. Advertisements and links fill the screen, but none is remotely related to Mignon Nevada's career or to opera or to Ireland, where she performed on that occasion. A large banner trumpets a Consumer Reports sweepstakes. A sidebar links to Blackberry ad, flu treatments, a health care firm, career opportunities, and home value estimates. Then another ad section for financial advice, health care, and weight loss. This is completely untargeted. The average reader skims the one paragraph of useful information and then flees. They'd have a better chance of keeping my attention if they linked to other articles about that opera--or at the very least to ads for the New York Metropolitan Opera and Irish vacation spots. -Durova -- http://durova.blogspot.com/