[WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:20 PM, FT2<ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> The purposes of citations divide roughly into two overlapping needs - 1/ for
> people who do edit to verify stated content facts, 2/ for readers to find
> further information and (sometimes) to check content.

Nicely done, sir.

Yes, as someone who patrols Recent Changes using Huggle [[WP:HUGGLE]]
I come across "referenced" edits that turn out, when you click the
attached link, not to tally with the statement at all. For example, a
recent one I saw I knew looked funny from the outset in that the
statement was quite specific but the citation was to the too general
sounding www.f1.com (the front page of the Grand Prix website). I
searched to see if I could drill down and confirm and replace the
citation but failed.

I will be in a world of frustration and hurt if I am confronted with
"please subscribe for $5 to access this article". I wouldn't *remove*
the citation because, as a previous poster indicated, my failure to
access is not cause to disregard "good faith".

> Accordingly if news did become pay-only WMF may obtain some kind of
> subscription to major sources, accessible to a wide but well defined subset
> of editors (users with > 500 edits? users agreed by a community process to
> be suitable?).

That's an interesting idea. Could work. I have a feeling they might
ask us to sacrifice Wikinews and stop covering current events as their
price, though. I would if I were them. Wikinews is not only direct
competition but it does (and don't hate me for this) leech off all
their sources. I see no good reason why they should support their
potential competition, no matter how tiddly Wikinews is in terms of
online news. Wikinews might have to be the sacrificial goat. We may
have to say goodbye to great articles like Hurricane Katrina and say
that we'll create articles that refer to things 12 months gone.