Jan,
You are BCC'd on this response as it is "for the records" on the
Wikinews mailing list. I, personally, have taken an enormous amount of
flak recently, been forced to surrender positions of authority
on-project, and feel there is an element of campaigning to drive me
off-project for my more acerbic style. At 41, I doubt that will change.
Off-wiki I have discussed with one or two old-timers a change or two to
our policies. This was prompted by what went on with your contributions,
and their reasoning in ceasing to actively contribute to the project.
Effectively, after sending this email, I am going to be BOLD (A sort-of
policy on-project) and change the directions and rules around material
that is deemed stale. If it is original reporting, I feel it should be
moved to a user's personal space on-wiki instead of deleted. In a
nutshell, you should never lose that work and be free to build upon it
in the future.
Should you have anything further to add, please consider if you wish to
divulge this email address to a public mailing list. If you are happy
with that, then please use a reply to all option.
One off-wiki comment was that, given your genuine credentials, and with
the help of one or two sv volunteers, there is a small chance you could
help kickstart
. You're obviously smart enough to follow
the remainder of this email and see where this would be a
career-enhancing opportunity for you.
I would be happy to continue our discussion regarding evidence (audio,
and video), but in a public space. I know full-well that to get your
UN-recognised credentials you are required to be making the majority of
your income from journalistic activities; I faced a similar roadblock
(to official recognition) when I was still resident in Belgium. Not
everyone on WMF projects is an utter freetard who would take away your
livelihood. If some way to share 'evidence' privately can be set up, I
think you could be an extremely valuable contributor.
You, provided people stopped bickering, and did real work, would then be
able to capitalise on Wikiewsies' writing skills to bring your
photographic work wider prominence.
A closing comment, more for the peanut gallery, is that I queried a
local university about mature student entrance requirements for their
journalism course. The response did indeed indicate that, as well as
surpassing the bar for entrance by almost double the required points, my
contributions on-wiki would be taken into consideration and could,
potentially, see me bypass a year of the full course towards a degree.
As an old socialist, I would prefer to see Margaret Thatcher, and her
"pay for your education" policies safely in their grave first. Ideally,
buried face-down to ensure they dig the wrong way if reanimated.
Brian.
On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 20:44 +0200, Janwikifoto wrote:
Hello Brian and all,
First just another comment, I see that the story "Sweden's Crown
Princess marries commoner" is on the first page, and if you look at
the photos you will find they are taken by Janwikifoto and
Prolineuser. Me and another guy. With official media accreditation,
along with the big press agencies. So Wikimedia is now in some way
considered 'world class'. Maybe it would be interesting for somebody
to a story about Wikimedia being officially accredited?
Going back to the emails and the potential story,
How much
do you change what they have really said ?
That is a give-and take-judgement
decision.
Ok
Personally, I think a comprehensible english is
You really didn't get the
"extracted" quote from Orwell in the style
guide, did you?
I have read and agree on the six points. I have not read the full
text by Orwell, will take too much time. Commenting on the six points,
I have never seen "bete-noire" before, I did understand it from the
surrounding text, but it is not something I would expect a common
englishman to understand :-)
The link to Orwell's full article in Spectrum
is an ideal example.
Got to do that later. Now end-of-month is near, I have to get some
text done and send out an invoice, in order to live. Academic studies
comes later.
And, yes, Wikinews needs more articles. That does
not mean dropping from
a very high standard of English.
Ok, what do we do with this Frank la Rue material then? If I was the
sole judge I would shorten what they said, in that process clean up
spoken word to written word, and try to extract the meaning. Cut maybe
30-40% of the text as some is lengthy discussions. However, I could
not achieve a very hight standard of english, just a decent standard,
and it would mean changing exactly what they said to what I interpret
them as having said. That is what I would do if I was the sole judge.
So what way forward do you suggest? That somebody re-writes the
text from what it is like now (the emailed version)? Or that I try
again to bring it into some kind of shape?
I know a few people have upset you by requesting
the video footage
No, not upset, it is simply that they do not think before they ask.
They consider it so natural to upload everything. What I have is
23 minutes of speech, and I simply do not want to send out what I
have taken time to record, for free, without getting paid, so somebody
else is writing another story out that, and getting paid (what I mean is
that somebody will pick up the sound and write a story and sell to say
Guardian and get paid). I do not mind free info sharing, but now I am
broke, and I am definetly not going to send out all the stuff that took
so much time. I can write something for free, sometime, for Wikinews,
if it does not take too much time. This has taken a lot of time, I
have written all this as a 'first-time' experience in the hope that
problems can be fixed for the future.
'clear-speaking' extract of the
associated audio
What is an 'extract'? The sound is the important stuff, the video
gives relatively little information.
Extracting certain parts takes again time. Exactly what will/can
be achieved by sound extract? What I wrote in the emailed text
version is pretty close to what was said. What is the proposal for
edit? Again, I look forward to suggestions on what to do, what way
to go.
I wrote another short story on German foreign minister talks on Gaza,
that story is really not very interesting, BUT it is original reporting,
and there are reasonably good photos. Will anyone fix that up for
presentation?
I see problems in the future. I can supply a few original stories,
that have not been published extensively elsewhere, but I can not
write an excellent english, and I do not see anyone that can and
really will edit the english sufficiently, and I do not see that it
will happen quickly before the story dies of old age. Swedish
Wikinews is dead, I think last article is dated 2009. Should I just
forget Wikinews totally? And just do a few Wiki photo uploads and
nothing else?
Best Regards from
Jan