Hello Andrew,
These are very fine ideas indeed. I have always found the 'breaking news' stories on Wikinews to be among its least interesting content, for all of the reasons you note.
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, reading this thread with much interest. Lots of ideas on this...
Immediately, I saw how Wikinews could step up to this challenge. Oral Citations is fundamentally an act of journalism ... in essence, if People are Knowledge, create referenceable works and stories from those people.
<snip more interesting observations>
And, in Wikipedia's crowdsourced way, potentially a re-oriented, mobilized Wikinews could produce in one week what National Geographic normally produces in one year. This could be a multimedia endeavor that could kick up the Wikimedia efforts in audio and video that seem to have stalled lately.
WMF's mission is about giving free access to "the sum of all human knowledge."
Wikipedia is about condensing and curating knowledge.
Wikinews can be the force to go explore and acquire it.
My hat is off to you. I went and put one on just to reread this email.
This is an inspiring and powerful idea for what Wikinews can be, and I hope we realize it -- and continue to capture oral history, for citation and otherwise.
Sam.