Strainu,
Simply leaving the world of news to others is not really an option for the Foundation. Recall that its vision is that
By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the
ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.
It can't achieve that by abandoning news.
JPS
On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 6:29 PM Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
În mar., 16 apr. 2019 la 12:38, Dan Garry (Deskana) djgwiki@gmail.com a scris:
Splitting off the Wikinews discussion from the branding discussion...
On Tue, 16 Apr 2019 at 07:52, Jennifer Pryor-Summers < jennifer.pryorsummers@gmail.com> wrote:
Compared to Wikitribune it is! But more importantly, if Wikinews is
not
thriving, then why not? Does it lack resources? What could or should
the
WMF do to revive it?
In my opinion, nothing. Wikinews was a nice idea, but it didn't work out, and I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation investing resources into
trying
to bring it back to life is really worth it. In fact, I think the
Wikimedia
Foundation isn't the right group to try to breathe new life into the project anyway—we, as a volunteer community, could invest our time in bringing new content into it. That doesn't happen though. Why is that?
For
me, I'm voting with my actions rather than my words—it's because it just isn't important enough compared to other things. It's okay to think that.
I personally believe the law of the hammer [1] had a very significant contribution to the launch of Wikinews (as well as Wikiversity, Wikispecies and Wiktionary): "we have a wiki, what else can we use it for?" Stated differently ("we have a mission and an idea aligned with that mission, what kind of wiki would we need for that?") the outcome might have been radically different. Some projects might have never happened, others might have been years ago where they are now and again others might have happened later (e.g. a wiki does not seem a great fit for University courses, but Wikiversity might have happened anyway as part of the OpenAccess movement. Or not).
It's a bit late to change history, but it's not too late to admit some of the projects are a failure in the current form and start again - or just drop them. As somebody else in the conversion put it "we must have ways to try and fail fast".
Strainu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
Also, I'd prefer to see the Wikimedia Foundation trying to do fewer
things
but do them better rather than taking more on; I think the annual plan reflects that it is trying to do so.
Perhaps some of the money spent on rebranding would be better spent on the projects that are not doing so well as the big Wikipedias -- or perhaps the WMF should cut its losses and close them
down,
on the principle of reinforcing success instead.
I suspect that significantly less money is being spent on this rebranding effort than people might think. A short engagement with an external consultant, and some staff time to think about it and publish some pages
to
solicit comment, is a relatively small investment compared to what it
might
take to bootstrap improvements to breathe life into a mostly dead
project.
I don't think it's really helpful to guess about the cost of things...
yes,
I broke my own rule right at the start of this paragraph. ;-)
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