Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com: <snip>
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.
Theo
Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the 'global south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse, but on many others we're not.
It is this potential that does matter though - but to achieve that, we should work on it.
But more importantly - you are correct that Wikinews' user base is simply too small. You can theoretically write an encyclopedia with 3 skilled people, as long as you take your time and do a hell lot of research. However, this is not true for a news source - to make that work you always need up to date everything, you need to cover the latest news and have interesting research. If Wikipedia stands still for a week (no edits) we can just continue after that. If the New York Times would do the same, most likely they have lost a lot of their readers. Continuity and masses are even more important for Wikinews than for Wikipedia to make it work.
Therefore, I'm not so sure if forking is good per se. Wikinews was already too small to my liking, and splitting it up might bring the community even further below the critical mass. At the same time it might bring the apparently needed changes for some, and make them work - I do hope though that both communities will quickly figure out what methods work best, and join together again to make it more likely to pass this threshold of activity.
Lodewijk