On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:43, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:15 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 20:02, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
The question is, would paid staff be a healthy temporary boost for sustainability or be futile artificial life support? I fear it's the latter.
As Wikipedia requires WMF employees to keep servers running, Wikinews requires one or small number of paid editors to keep news outlet running. There is nothing artificial in that.
That's a erroneous comparison -- those same WMF employees keep the servers running for all of Wikimedia. It's not specific to Wikipedia's community fundamentals for encyclopedia writing.
"running for all of Wikimedia" ~ "running for Wikipedia"; I've never heard for any relevant campaign out of Wikipedia and initiated by WMF (in relation to content projects, of course).
The problem is, of course, that it's hard to move out from the Wikipedia-centric perspective; and that move will be needed soon for Wikipedia itself.
Wikisource, for example, needs money to scan books. Wiktionary needs also. Even Wikipedia benefits from the projects in which money has given for writing articles (last example: WM Canada program for writing articles in medicine). But, it's easier to accept those things, than to accept that Wikinews needs at least one person to care about things when no one else is able to care.
I'd argue that deadline-oriented news, being time critical and reliant on single observers, is inherently a misfit with wiki principles of eventualism, and the collaborative "magic."
Nothing is perfect. That person shouldn't be the only one who does that. Such person should be just someone on which the project could default if nobody else is able to do that.
Features are the natural fit for Wikinews going forward, and it would be great to see more moves into that area.
Nobody reads news source just because it has one article per day and one feature per month. Thus, it's not possible to create critical mass around it.