I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that Wikinews were born with wrong premises. I discussed extensfully about that with some fellow wikipedians, and we agreed that Wikinews could not compete with other newspapers/journals, especially because, right now, it relies on them.
Wikipedia creates knowledge and (neutral) narratives from primary and secondary sources, Wikinews never succeed to be a primary source of news, but instead it collects links about (not so recent) news. Often small, brief articles that add nothing to the link, in the first place. As a user, I wonder why should I check Wikinews instead of the New York Times website, which is much more update.
I think Wikinews could work well on some topics, news that don't last a single day, but instead needs a history and a timetable. On those topics, Wikinews could fill an informative gap, because even newspapers archives are just aggregating different articles on the same subjects, but none of them write a (neutral) narrative integrating all of them. This could be an interesting direction.
Furthermore, there could be a (very bold) help from the community of Wikipedia: in case of patent "recentism" (unfortunately, often catastrophic events) people swarm on wikipedia adding interesting/less interesting/trivial facts on something that already happened. If they could be redirected on Wikinews, that would be the right place where to write all that stuff. Moreover, Wikipedians could write a more neutral article when things have slowed down, relying on the Wikinews article.
My 2cents, obviously.
Aubrey
2011/9/13 Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred languages and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews was never able to capitalize on this.
When Wikinews works, it can be truly fantastic. A personal example: I wrote a short article earlier in the year for English Wikinews on the smoking ban in Spain.[1] It very quickly got translated into Farsi, French and Hungarian.
At Wikimania this year, I spoke to some guys who write for Spanish Wikinews and once of the things they pointed out was that in a number of South American countries, the national newspaper websites often have paywalls for older articles. Making sure that ordinary people can access both current news and a historical archive of news with verifiability provided by checked, reliable sources and context provided by deep links into Wikipedia is much *more* important for democratic citizenship in countries with less free-as-in-beer media available than English. The multi-lingual benefits of having it be free-as-in-freedom are good too.
This is especially true now as cuts to the BBC have led to less availability of independent news coverage in some countries.[2] (And, yes, I know, some people are going to question the independence of the BBC...)
[1] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spanish_smoking_ban_takes_effect_in_bars_and_res... [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
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