[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Thomas Dalton]

On 15 September 2011 05:12, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:17, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> 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).