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(a)tommorris.org>rg>:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:34, Theo10011
<de10011(a)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_re…
[2]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/bbc-world-service-cuts-response
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
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