This edition includes information on GLAM, Education, research activities, technical news, local project news and our original reporting efforts across all projects. To subscribe to our on wiki version, please list your name at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikinewsie_Group/Newsletter .
Newsletter text below.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
The Wikinewsie Group News
There is less to report, as the group spent time focusing on behind-the-scenes aspects of obtaining thematic organization recognition.
The University of Wollongong class participation on English Wikinews is winding up as the semester ended. It looks like a new semester may be starting soon. The instructor has created a presentation about the class on Wikinews that can be found at StudentsInWikinews.
A member of The Wikinewsie Group met with a GLAM partner about the value of English Wikinews and Wikinoticias for freely sharing knowledge about culture.
Technical updates
Pi zero has moved to a new phase in the development of an improved reviewing tool for English Wikinews.
Gryllida is working on the development of a tool to make translating material from one project to another easier. The new beta wmtrans translation tool here, which you can use to translateWikipedia and Wikinews articles from one language to another. Its difference from the Meta translation tools is include the the ability to translate an article as a whole, per-paragraph, and add new paragraphs if desired; a dictionary box for you to look up geographical names without loading entire Wikipedia pages; and whole-page translation philosophy instead of translating by parts. The tool also features a multilingual interface; you can add new sections to data.ini to add your own. You are encouraged to send them, and bug reports, to Gryllida.
Discussions have been going on behind the scenes about the potential for The Wikinewsie Group to support the technical aspects for Wikinews project development following suggestions on Wikimedia-l that this would be a place chapters could demonstrate leadership potential and work with the Foundation. There are currently a number of developers active in the Wikinews community.
Research
Given feedback by a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board (Samuel Klien) that the English language project should consider content import from other free news sources as a way of increasing community participation, content output and traffic, research was done inside the community using another language project as a baseline to determine the potential impact in terms of achieving those goals. A copy of this research can be found at Research:Wikinews Content Import Analysis. In a nutshell, the findings are: content import did not result in increased community output or increased community size. Content import also resulted in fewer page views per published article. Content import was not successful at achieving a positive community or traffic related impact.
A tiny piece of research done examining relative article popularity by year on English Wikinews can found at Article rank and article date. More in-depth research along these lines may produce interesting results.
Across the languages
Over on Italian Wikinews on July 25, they hit 30,000 total pages.
English Wikinews completed elections for their Arbitration Committee. Brian McNeil, Pi zero, Mikemoral, LauraHale, RockerballAustralia, and William S. Saturn were elected to the one year position.
Brian McNeil — currently at the Edinburgh Fringe — is sharing a variety of video clips via English Wikinews'Facebook page. Copyright restrictions prevent most of these media files being uploaded to Commons; fair-use on Wikinews itself requires legal advice beforehand.
Two members of the The Wikinewsie Group provisional board attend the IRC meeting on July 26 for the Program Evaluation and Design as the board begins to think about and conducts its own evaluation of efforts to increase content and increase community participation. They observed the August 1 metrics meeting.
Why Wikinews? Editorials on why people support and contribute to Wikinews projects