All I am saying is Wikipedia is not a news site. And if we have to have a policy on why we are not Wikipedia, then they should have one on why they are not Wikinews.
-- Jason Safoutin Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org
Wikipedia needs to do what is good for Wikipedia, and some news coverage is good for Wikipedia. Detailed original reporting is outside Wikipedia's mission, as is a sophisticated presentation of the significance of news. As things happen, information about them is added to the corpus of human knowledge and thus added to Wikipedia. This includes information on what was considered news at a particular time. Like its performance in other areas Wikipedia's treatment of the news is rather pedestrian, simply a compendium of what is being reported. It is not and is not intended to be a record of what actually happened at a particular time.
Fred
El 5/26/09 4:28 AM, Fred Bauder escribió:
Wikipedia needs to do what is good for Wikipedia, and some news coverage is good for Wikipedia. Detailed original reporting is outside Wikipedia's mission, as is a sophisticated presentation of the significance of news. As things happen, information about them is added to the corpus of human knowledge and thus added to Wikipedia.
Wikinews does relatively little to really support firsthand reporting either. I'll admit I'm not a hardcore Wikinewsie, but what I've seen over the last years has generally been either:
* Original interviews or * Re-reporting of news stories in other media
Look at today's top stories:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Trial_against_Church_of_Scientology_begins_in_Fr... http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/North_Korea_conducts_test_of_nuclear_weapon http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Obama_nominates_Sonia_Sotomayor_to_U.S._Supreme_... http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Cyclone_in_Bay_of_Bengal_kills_at_least_17
All four are just rehashes of information found at other news sites -- the sources are all media news outlets: CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, etc.
There is an original reporting section: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Portal:Original_reporting
but the stories are relatively rare, and even many of those seem to be basically "a public event happened, here's a description" or "a press conference happened, here's some info".
Wikinews lacks a local angle (there's no locality) or a unifying political angle (we're supposed to be neutral), either of which could make it much easier to organize original reporting. Compare with say Indynews, which has a strong political angle and has been much more active about providing infrastructure. Editorial quality sometimes suffers, but I at least feel like they've got a mission...
-- brion