On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:24, me@marcusbuck.org wrote:
It's my opinion, that Wikimedia should try to support a Wikinews by paying a editor in chief and a core team of reporters to secure that the project always stays above the critical mass.
That's a kind of heresy. But it's impossible to drive [relevant] news source without paid editors. In a private talk with Sj, I mentioned that to him a year or so ago in private conversation, but it was, as I said, heresy, For his ears :P
The main difference between Wikipedia (projects with similar dynamics) and Wikinews is necessity for maintenance. And that's -- huh.
Serbian Wikinews is driving on deal with the news agency Beta and bot which I wrote. But, for ~10 days it doesn't have content added by bot because formatting of Beta pages changed. I have to: (1) remember on which server I run that bot; maybe password, as well; (2) analyze four years old code; (3) change it; (4) but, most importantly, I have to have free time for that. And willingness.
Now, imagine news source without that bot and with necessity to have news between ultra important events. Five persons would be needed to cover 24/7, not counting editor. But, let's say that we just need those 5 persons and that editors would be people from the community. ~40 stewards, volunteers, are able to cover most important issues 24/7, mostly. And stewards are volunteers of the system which works.
Wikinews is not working and up to ~10 days ago the only useful Wikinews -- as general source of information -- was Serbian Wikinews and just thanks to the deal with a news agency and one bot. I tried to do the same with English Wikinews, but, maintaining harvester from a couple of sources is a job which uses a lot of time, on daily basis. (Still, if anyone with Python knowledge is willing to share workload with me to cover English [and other] Wikinews editions, I am still willing to activate bots.)