By failing I mean that it never achieved any sort of siginificant presence.
When Wikinews was started it was, imho, to shunt news off the main project
into its own space. News by it's nature is far more verbose then
encyclopedic material. News inundates you constantly, while encyclopedic material is
more placid and stable.
News should be far more material. And yet the English Wikinews has only 15
thousand articles. So something seriously went wrong in that approach. It
simply did not capture the attention of any significant part of the core
community.
It's a bit silly to talk about three thousand links, when we have over
three million articles. So that's one tenth of one percent? In terms of news
outlets, our own news outlet gets a trivial number of links compared to
others. And it's ours! That's my point. That's what I consider failing.
Crawling along with your tongue out in the desert, while the nearest water is 20
miles away.
Better to re-focus attention on those projects which are successful, than
have ten non-successful projects dragging off any resources at all.
Will