On 13 September 2011 13:06, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
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
If volunteer written news is an impossible model to make work, then we should just close Wikinews. We shouldn't turn it into a professional project. That's not what we do. It's not even something we know how to do. Our expertise in is voluntary, collaborative content generation. We shouldn't stray away from that.
So, the question is whether it is possible to write a newspaper using volunteers. I suspect it is, but only if you can somehow reach the critical mass. Once you've got there, it should be relatively easy to stay there. Does anyone have any ideas for how to achieve that?